Communication Matters

From flocking birds to swimming bacteria, when life moves together it relies on communication. Amoebae are single-cell organisms that use chemicals to communicate when swarming – here researchers mimic their behaviour using a mathematical model to simulate communicating 'agents' (top left). The virtual agents send and receive signals, creating mock chemical patterns (bottom left) which guide a ‘collective movement’ The exchange of signals helps the agents organise themselves, and the direction of their movement (highlighted in rainbow colours) gradually combine into one swirl. The team also develop a larger scale model of a 'field' of particles (right), watching how similar 'droplets' join together into 'streams'. Predicting how order emerges from disorder in different forms of living active matter may help researchers design microrobots set to tasks inside the body, or to use their insights to disrupt harmful swarms of pathogens.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Video from work by Alexander Ziepke and colleagues
• Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics and Center for NanoSciences, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, Germany
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, November 2022