Journal
BIOPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 106, Issue 9, Pages 1928-1937Publisher
CELL PRESS
DOI: 10.1016/j.bpj.2014.03.035
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation
- Academy of Finland
- Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology
- Tampere Doctoral Programme in Information Science and Engineering
- TUT President's graduate programme
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The cytoplasm of Escherichia coli is a crowded, heterogeneous environment. From single cell live imaging, we investigated the spatial kinetics and heterogeneities of synthetic RNA-protein complexes. First, although their known tendency to accumulate at the cell poles does not appear to introduce asymmetries between older and newer cell poles within a cell lifetime, these emerge with cell divisions. This suggests strong polar retention of the complexes, which we verified in their history of positions and mean escape time from the poles. Next, we show that the polar retention relies on anisotropies in the displacement distribution in the region between midcell and poles, whereas the speed is homogeneous along the major cell axis. Afterward, we establish that these regions are at the border of the nucleoid and shift outward with cell growth, due to the nucleoid's replication. Overall, the spatiotemporal kinetics of the complexes, which is robust to suboptimal temperatures, suggests that nucleoid occlusion is a source of dynamic heterogeneities of macromolecules in E. coli that ultimately generate phenotypic differences between sister cells.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available