Coli Chromosome Into a Nucleoid Filament
Strong intranucleoid interactions organize the Escherichia coli chromosome into a nucleoid filament Paul A. Wigginsa,1, Keith C. Cheverallsa,b, Joshua S. Martina,b, Robert Lintnera, and Jané Kondevb aWhitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, 9 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142; and bMartin A. Fisher School of Physics, Brandeis University, 415 South Street, Waltham, MA 02453 Edited by Nancy E Kleckner, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved January 27, 2010 (received for review October 26, 2009) The stochasticity of chromosome organization was investigated by Our quantitative measurements of E. coli nucleoid structure con- fluorescently labeling genetic loci in live Escherichia coli cells. In firm this qualitative picture: The body of the nucleoid is linearly spite of the common assumption that the chromosome is well organized along the long-axis of the cell, implying that the modeled by an unstructured polymer, measurements of the locus nucleoid has a nearly-constant linear packing density, except distributions reveal that the E. coli chromosome is precisely orga- for a short region, genomically ter-proximate, which connects nized into a nucleoid filament with a linear order. Loci in the body the two arms of the chromosome (11). But in spite of the obser- of the nucleoid show a precision of positioning within the cell of vation of a linear chromosome organization in both E. coli and better than 10% of the cell length. The precision of interlocus dis- C. crescentus, the mechanism which gives rise to this characteristic tance of genomically-proximate loci was better than 4% of the cell structure is unknown. length. The measured dependence of the precision of interlocus To probe the mechanism of nucleoid organization, we measure distance on genomic distance singles out intranucleoid interactions and analyze the position fluctuations of single loci and the cor- as the mechanism responsible for chromosome organization.
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