ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Physical manipulation of the Escherichia coli chromosome reveals its soft nature.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 99 papers.
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99 citing papers in PubMed, 210 citations in OpenAlex.
- Domain dynamics within the PriA DNA helicase regulate DNA replication restart.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- Bacterial growth under confinement requires transcriptional adaptation to resist turgor pressure build-up.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Antimicrobial peptoids pass rapidly through bacterial membranes and flocculate ribosomes and DNA: A single-cell fluorescence study.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Crowding-induced collapse and adsorption of polymers with nonuniform bending stiffness.Soft matter · 2026Article
- Expression of nano-engineered RNA organelles in bacteria.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Abundant positively-charged proteins underlie JCVI-Syn3A's expanded nucleoid and ribosome distribution.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Review
- Bacterial chromosome conformation and cell-free gene expression in synthetic 2D compartments.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Crowding-induced collapse and adsorption of polymers with nonuniform bending stiffness.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Nonequilibrium polysome dynamics promote chromosome segregation and its coupling to cell growth ineLife · 2025Article
- The nucleoid of rapidly growing Escherichia coli localizes close to the inner membrane and is organized by transcription, translation, and cell geometry.Nature communications · 2025Article
- A microfluidic platform for extraction and analysis of bacterial genomic DNA.Lab on a chip · 2025Article
- Nonequilibrium polysome dynamics promote chromosome segregation and its coupling to cell growth inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Relative Distribution of DnaA and DNA inInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Insights on the effect of macromolecular crowding on transcription and its regulation.QRB discovery · 2025Article
- Hypothesis: bacteria live on the edge of phase transitions with a cell cycle regulated by a water-clock.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2024Article
- Differentiating the roles of proteins and polysomes in nucleoid size homeostasis in Escherichia coli.Biophysical journal · 2024Article
- Loop-extruders alter bacterial chromosome topology to direct entropic forces for segregation.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Compaction and Segregation of DNA inLife (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Leveraging Active Learning to Establish Efficient In Vitro Transcription and Translation from Bacterial Chromosomal DNA.ACS omega · 2024Article
39 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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8 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Replicating bacterial chromosomes continuously demix from each other and segregate within a compact volume inside the cell called the nucleoid. Although many proteins involved in this process have been identified, the nature of the global forces that shape and segregate the chromosomes has remained unclear because of limited knowledge of the micromechanical properties of the chromosome. In this work, we demonstrate experimentally the fundamentally soft nature of the bacterial chromosome and the entropic forces that can compact it in a crowded intracellular environment. We developed a unique "micropiston" and measured the force-compression behavior of single Escherichia coli chromosomes in confinement. Our data show that forces on the order of 100 pN and free energies on the order of 10(5) k(B)T are sufficient to compress the chromosome to its in vivo size. For comparison, the pressure required to hold the chromosome at this size is a thousand-fold smaller than the surrounding turgor pressure inside the cell. Furthermore, by manipulation of molecular crowding conditions (entropic forces), we were able to observe in real time fast (approximately 10 s), abrupt, reversible, and repeatable compaction-decompaction cycles of individual chromosomes in confinement. In contrast, we observed much slower dissociation kinetics of a histone-like protein HU from the whole chromosome during its in vivo to in vitro transition. These results for the first time provide quantitative, experimental support for a physical model in which the bacterial chromosome behaves as a loaded entropic spring in vivo.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.