Living multicellular systems induce decodable spatial patterns in bacterial collectives

Abstract

Living systems continuously modify their environments through chemical, mechanical, metabolic and bioelectrical activity. Whether a presence of a multicellular system can be encoded into the emergent spatial organization of another living collective in a distributed and decodable way is unknown. Here we show that motile Bacillus subtilis populations reorganize their spatial and ionic collective states in response to nearby Xenopus embryos and Xenobots. The bacteria in a liquid culture formed autonomous motility-dependent patterns that were redirected by living targets into attraction halos, which tracked target position at a distance. Extracellular levels of potassium amplified attraction, altered local potassium dynamics, and coupled target presence to global pattern complexity. Self-supervised machine learning further identified distributed bacterial spatial signatures predictive of Xenopus embryo vs. Xenobot presence at a distance from the target. Together, these findings suggest that bacterial collectives can encode information about the state of other biota in their environment, revealing a previously unrecognized form of inter-kingdom interaction between living morphogenetic systems.