Welcome to the Mignot lab

The Mignot group is one of the twelve research teams of the "Laboratoire de Chimie Bactérienne" (LCB, Laboratory of Bacterial Chemistry), a joint CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université unit (UMR7283), a component of the "Institut de Microbiologie de la Méditerranée" (IMM, Mediterranean Institute of Microbiology) in Marseille (France).

Our team studies the model organism Myxococcus xanthus that has the ability to adopt two distinct modes of motility: the S-motility (Social), where cells move as a group in a coordinated manner and the A-motility (Adventurous), where cells individually move at the periphery of the colony, exploring their environment. M. xanthus is also a predatory bacterium and has the capacity to hunt, attack, kill and consume bacterial prey. When starving, M. xanthus cells can also aggregate and form fruiting bodies, increasing chances of survival.

Using interdisciplinary approaches (genetic, biophysics, biochemistry, cellular biology etc.), our group studies the spatio-temporal organization of the Myxococcus lifecycle globally and tries to answer to the following questions:

• What are the mechanisms of A- and S-motility? how do the motility systems cooperate?
• How does motility regulation drive collective motility behaviors?
• How does Myxococcus invade prey colonies and how are the prey cells killed and consumed?
• How is growth coupled to invasion and how is it regulated spatially?
• How do spatial patterns develop in response to starvation?