ArticleCell reports2014
Systematic perturbation of cytoskeletal function reveals a linear scaling relationship between cell geometry and fitness.
Article in Cell reports, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Bacterial cell widening alters periplasmic size and activates envelope stress responses.The EMBO journal · 2025Article
- Evolutionary rescue of sphericaleLife · 2025Article
- Genetic mixing and demixing on expanding spherical frontiers.ISME communications · 2024Article
- Protein aggregates act as a deterministic disruptor during bacterial cell size homeostasis.Cellular and molecular life sciences : CMLS · 2023Article
- Bacterial cell-size changes resulting from altering the relative expression of Min proteins.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Characterization of proteome-size scaling by integrative omics reveals mechanisms of proliferation control in cancer.Science advances · 2023Article
- Shared biophysical mechanisms determine early biofilm architecture development across different bacterial species.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Bacterial respiration during stationary phase induces intracellular damage that leads to delayed regrowth.iScience · 2022Article
- Transcriptomics and Functional Analysis of Copper Stress Response in the Sulfate-Reducing BacteriumInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Multiple conserved states characterize the twist landscape of the bacterial actin homolog MreB.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2022Article
- Article
- Emergent spatiotemporal population dynamics with cell-length control of synthetic microbial consortia.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Precise regulation of the relative rates of surface area and volume synthesis in bacterial cells growing in dynamic environments.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Experimental Evolution of Magnetite Nanoparticle Resistance inNanomaterials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Article
- Environmental and Physiological Factors Affecting High-Throughput Measurements of Bacterial Growth.mBio · 2020Article
- A bacterial size law revealed by a coarse-grained model of cell physiology.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Diversification of cell size is hypothesized to have occurred through a process of evolutionary optimization, but direct demonstrations of causal relationships between cell geometry and fitness are lacking. Here, we identify a mutation from a laboratory-evolved bacterium that dramatically increases cell size through cytoskeletal perturbation and confers a large fitness advantage. We engineer a library of cytoskeletal mutants of different sizes and show that fitness scales linearly with respect to cell size over a wide physiological range. Quantification of the growth rates of single cells during the exit from stationary phase reveals that transitions between "feast-or-famine" growth regimes are a key determinant of cell-size-dependent fitness effects. We also uncover environments that suppress the fitness advantage of larger cells, indicating that cell-size-dependent fitness effects are subject to both biophysical and metabolic constraints. Together, our results highlight laboratory-based evolution as a powerful framework for studying the quantitative relationships between morphology and fitness.
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Registered trials
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