Bacterial collectives can track and report Xenopus embryos, Levin lab preprint shows

MacrinePhD · x · 2026-09-09

A new preprint from Michael Levin and Josh Bongard's teams shows motile B. subtilis dynamically tracks and decodes Xenopus embryos versus Xenobots, reorganizing into spatial patterns via potassium signaling to report the presence, position, and biological identity of nearby biota — framing morphogenesis as distributed sensing across kingdoms.

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