Interrogating the Escherichia Coli Cell Cycle by Cell Dimension Perturbations
Interrogating the Escherichia coli cell cycle by cell dimension perturbations Hai Zhenga,b, Po-Yi Hoc, Meiling Jianga, Bin Tangd, Weirong Liua,b, Dengjin Lia, Xuefeng Yue, Nancy E. Klecknerf, Ariel Amirc,1, and Chenli Liua,b,1 aCenter for Synthetic Biology Engineering Research, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, People’s Republic of China; bUniversity of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, People’s Republic of China; cSchool of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; dDepartment of Materials Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, People’s Republic of China; eInstitute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, People’s Republic of China; and fDepartment of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 Edited by Kiyoshi Mizuuchi, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, and approved November 14, 2016 (received for review September 30, 2016) Bacteria tightly regulate and coordinate the various events in by a phenomenological size variable, with no explicit reference to their cell cycles to duplicate themselves accurately and to control DNA replication. their cell sizes. Growth of Escherichia coli, in particular, follows a A second class of models for control of cell division postulates relation known as Schaechter’s growth law. This law says that the that cell division is governed by the process of DNA replica- average cell volume scales exponentially with growth rate, with tion, which can be described as follows. The time from a repli- a scaling exponent equal to the time from initiation of a round cation initiation event to the cell division that segregates the of DNA replication to the cell division at which the corresponding corresponding sister chromosomes can be split into the C period, sister chromosomes segregate.
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