Colloquium: Can entropy save bacteria?

This article presents a physical biology approach to understanding organization and segregation of bacterial chromosomes. The author uses a “piston” analogy for bacterial chromosomes in a cell, which leads to a phase diagram for the organization of two athermal chains confined in a closed geometry characterized by two length scales (length and width). When applied to rod-shaped bacteria such as Escherichia coli, this phase diagram predicts that, despite strong confinement, duplicated chromosomes will demix, ı.e., there exists a primordial physical driving force for chromosome segregation. The author discusses segregation of duplicating chromosomes using the concentric-shell model, which predicts that newly synthesized DNA will be found in the periphery of the chromosome during replication. In contrast to chromosomes, these results suggest that most plasmids will be randomly distributed inside the cell because of their small sizes. An active partitioning system is therefore required for accurate segregation of low-copy number plasmids. Implications of these results are also sketched, e.g., on the role of proteins, segregation mechanisms for bacteria of diverse shapes, cell cycle of an artificial cell, and evolution.