Lifeboat Foundation

🧬 🧑🏻‍🔬 By Prof. Itzhak Fishov, et al.

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Phenotypic variability in isogenic bacterial populations is a remarkable feature that helps them cope with external stresses, yet it is incompletely understood. This variability can stem from gene expression noise and/or the unequal partitioning of low-copy-number freely diffusing proteins during cell division. Some high-copy-number components are transiently associated with almost immobile large assemblies (hyperstructures) and may be unequally distributed, contributing to bacterial phenotypic variability. We focus on the nucleoid hyperstructure containing numerous DNA-associated proteins, including the replication initiator DnaA. Previously, we found an increasing asynchrony in the nucleoid segregation dynamics in growing E. coli cell lineages and suggested that variable replication initiation timing may be the main cause of this phenomenon.