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      Interrogating the Escherichia coli cell cycle by cell dimension perturbations

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          Abstract

          Bacteria tightly regulate and coordinate the various events in their cell cycles to duplicate themselves accurately and to control their cell sizes. Growth of Escherichia coli, in particular, follows a relation known as Schaechter 's growth law. This law says that the average cell volume scales exponentially with growth rate, with a scaling exponent equal to the time from initiation of a round of DNA replication to the cell division at which the corresponding sister chromosomes segregate. Here, we sought to test the robustness of the growth law to systematic perturbations in cell dimensions achieved by varying the expression levels of mreB and ftsZ. We found that decreasing the mreB level resulted in increased cell width, with little change in cell length, whereas decreasing the ftsZ level resulted in increased cell length. Furthermore, the time from replication termination to cell division increased with the perturbed dimension in both cases. Moreover, the growth law remained valid over a range of growth conditions and dimension perturbations. The growth law can be quantitatively interpreted as a consequence of a tight coupling of cell division to replication initiation. Thus, its robustness to perturbations in cell dimensions strongly supports models in which the timing of replication initiation governs that of cell division, and cell volume is the key phenomenological variable governing the timing of replication initiation. These conclusions are discussed in the context of our recently proposed adder-per-origin model, in which cells add a constant volume per origin between initiations and divide a constant time after initiation.

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          Using buoyant mass to measure the growth of single cells

          We used a suspended microchannel resonator (SMR) combined with picoliter-scale microfluidic control to measure buoyant mass and determine the ‘instantaneous’ growth rates of individual cells. The SMR measures mass with femtogram precision, allowing rapid determination of the growth rate in a fraction of a complete cell cycle. We found that for individual cells of Bacillus subtilis, Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and mouse lymphoblasts, heavier cells grew faster than lighter cells.
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            Sequential establishment of stripe patterns in an expanding cell population.

            Periodic stripe patterns are ubiquitous in living organisms, yet the underlying developmental processes are complex and difficult to disentangle. We describe a synthetic genetic circuit that couples cell density and motility. This system enabled programmed Escherichia coli cells to form periodic stripes of high and low cell densities sequentially and autonomously. Theoretical and experimental analyses reveal that the spatial structure arises from a recurrent aggregation process at the front of the continuously expanding cell population. The number of stripes formed could be tuned by modulating the basal expression of a single gene. The results establish motility control as a simple route to establishing recurrent structures without requiring an extrinsic pacemaker.
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              Chromosome and replisome dynamics in E. coli: loss of sister cohesion triggers global chromosome movement and mediates chromosome segregation.

              Chromosome and replisome dynamics were examined in synchronized E. coli cells undergoing a eukaryotic-like cell cycle. Sister chromosomes remain tightly colocalized for much of S phase and then separate, in a single coordinate transition. Origin and terminus regions behave differently, as functionally independent domains. During separation, sister loci move far apart and the nucleoid becomes bilobed. Origins and terminus regions also move. We infer that sisters are initially linked and that loss of cohesion triggers global chromosome reorganization. This reorganization creates the 2-fold symmetric, ter-in/ori-out conformation which, for E. coli, comprises sister segregation. Analogies with eukaryotic prometaphase suggest that this could be a primordial segregation mechanism to which microtubule-based processes were later added. We see no long-lived replication "factory"; replication initiation timing does not covary with cell mass, and we identify changes in nucleoid position and state that are tightly linked to cell division. We propose that cell division licenses the next round of replication initiation via these changes.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                2017-01-03
                Article
                10.1073/pnas.1617932114
                1701.00587
                a5df0e26-2c2b-44d7-9d15-bce621a79a58

                http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

                History
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                PNAS December 27, 2016 vol. 113 no. 52 15000-15005
                q-bio.CB

                Cell biology
                Cell biology

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