Bacterial cell division: A moveable feast

A moveable feast.

Tracking the moveable feast: sonomicrometry and gastrointestinal motility.

Ultrasonomicrometry measures distance between piezoelectric crystals based on transmission time of ultrasound bursts. It allows monitoring of coordinated motion of small and delicate tissues, including gastrointestinal sphincters. Its suitability for motility studies in small animals such as mice suggests that its use in gastrointestinal studies will increase in coming years.

Bacterial cell division spirals into control.

D irecting proteins to specific subcellular addresses is a central problem in cell biology. Historically, perhaps because of their general lack of compartmentalized organelles, bacteria were viewed as relatively uniform at the subcellular level. However, with advances in fluorescence microscopy came the realization that bacteria, like their eukaryotic counterparts, segregate their proteins to d...

A mechanistic stochastic framework for regulating bacterial cell division

How exponentially growing cells maintain size homeostasis is an important fundamental problem. Recent single-cell studies in prokaryotes have uncovered the adder principle, where cells add a fixed size (volume) from birth to division, irrespective of their size at birth. To mechanistically explain the adder principle, we consider a timekeeper protein that begins to get stochastically expressed ...

Bacterial Cell Division: A Swirling Ring to Rule Them All?

FtsZ, a tubulin homologue and the major constituent of the bacterial Z ring, has been shown to assemble into curved filament bundles, which exhibit GTP-hydrolysis-dependent turnover. Surprisingly, the presence of its membrane adaptor FtsA renders this turnover directional, inducing treadmilling and collective circular motion of filaments in vitro.