FIG. 1.

Stages of fruiting body formation in wild-type M. xanthus. (A) Initial organization of cells after being spotted on an agarose surface (0 h). (B) Rearrangement of cells into a matte (3 h). (C) Towers of cells only a few cell layers thick (8 h). (D) Aggregation centers are larger towers of cells composed of many cell layers (10 h). (E) Mature fruiting body (48 h). Bar, 0.1 mm. Pictures are derived from two separate movies and are not spatially aligned. This figure contains some frames from Movie S1 in the supplemental material.