Fundamental Principles in Bacterial Physiology - History, Recent progress, and the Future with Focus on Cell Size Control: A Review

Abstract

Bacterial physiology is a branch of biology that aims to understand overarching principles of cellular reproduction. Many important issues in bacterial physiology are inherently quantitative, and major contributors to the field have often brought together tools and ways of thinking from multiple disciplines. This article presents a comprehensive overview of major ideas and approaches developed since the early 20th century for anyone who is interested in the fundamental problems in bacterial physiology. This article is divided into two parts. In the first part (Sections 1 to 3), we review the first `golden era' of bacterial physiology from the 1940s to early 1970s and provide a complete list of major references from that period. In the second part (Sections 4 to 7), we explain how the pioneering work from the first golden era has influenced various rediscoveries of general quantitative principles and significant further development in modern bacterial physiology. Specifically, Section 4 presents the history and current progress of the `adder' principle of cell size homeostasis. Section 5 discusses the implications of coarse-graining the cellular protein composition, and how the coarse-grained proteome `sectors' re-balance under different growth conditions. Section 6 focuses on physiological invariants, and explains how they are the key to understanding the coordination between growth and the cell cycle underlying cell size control in steady-state growth. Section 7 overviews how the temporal organization of all the internal processes enables balanced growth. In the final Section 8, we conclude by discussing the remaining challenges for the future in the field.

Published in Reports on Progress in Physics. (https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6633/aaa628) 96 pages, 48 figures, 7 boxes, 715 references

References in corpus (8)

• Cell size regulation in microorganisms
• Scaling laws governing stochastic growth and division of single bacterial cells
• Dynamic compartmentalization of bacteria: accurate division in E. coli
• Interrogating the Escherichia coli cell cycle by cell dimension perturbations
• Stochasticity and traffic jams in the transcription of ribosomal RNA: Intriguing role of termination and antitermination
• Cell-size maintenance: universal strategy revealed
• Cellular organization by self-organization : mechanisms and models for Min protein dynamics
• A Coarse-Grained Biophysical Model of E. coli and Its Application to Perturbation of the rRNA Operon Copy Number

Cited by in corpus (18)

• Characterization of cell division control strategies through continuous rate models
• Cellular resource allocation strategies for cell size and shape control in bacteria
• Mitigating long queues and waiting times with service resetting
• Cell size regulation induces sustained oscillations in the population growth rate
• Fluctuation relations and fitness landscapes of growing cell populations
• Scale invariance of cell size fluctuations in starving bacteria
• Analytical cell size distribution: lineage-population bias and parameter inference
• Growth-laws and invariants from ribosome biogenesis in lower Eukarya
• Branching processes with resetting as a model for cell division
• Queues with resetting: a perspective
• Master equation approach to the stochastic accumulation dynamics of bacterial cell cycle
• Competition between transient oscillations and early stochasticity in exponentially growing populations
• From noisy cell size control to population growth: when variability can be beneficial
• Optimal metabolic strategies for microbial growth in stationary random environments
• Toward a realistic model of multilayered bacterial colonies
• Cell lineage statistics with incomplete population trees
• Universal Transitions between Growth and Dormancy via Intermediate Complex Formation
• Physical limits on chemical sensing in bounded domains