ArticleNature nanotechnology2015
Symmetry and scale orient Min protein patterns in shaped bacterial sculptures.
Article in Nature nanotechnology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 50 papers.
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50 citing papers in PubMed.
- Devising a divisome for synthetic cells.Nature reviews. Chemistry · 2026Review
- Mimicking Cellular Membranes With Micropatterned Lipid Bilayers.Chemphyschem : a European journal of chemical physics and physical chemistry · 2026Article
- Spatially Encoded Protocell Network for Non-Cascaded Parallel Biocomputation.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Cell-Size Confinement Drives Size-Dependent Scaling of Intracellular Reaction-Diffusion Waves for Robust Patterning.Small science · 2026Article
- Sensing the shape of a surface by tightly surface-bound filaments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Analysis of variations in cell envelope subproteome and cell length in Acinetobacter baumannii ATCC 19606International microbiology : the official journal of the Spanish Society for Microbiology · 2025Article
- Glycogen phase separation drives macromolecular rearrangement and asymmetric division inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Growth-dependent concentration gradient of the oscillating Min system in Escherichia coli.The Journal of cell biology · 2025Article
- Self-organized spatial targeting of contractile actomyosin rings for synthetic cell division.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Cell-free expression with a quartz crystal microbalance enables rapid, dynamic, and label-free characterization of membrane-interacting proteins.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Artificial cell system as a tool for investigating pattern formation mechanisms of intracellular reaction-diffusion waves.Biophysics and physicobiology · 2024Review
- Forceful patterning: theoretical principles of mechanochemical pattern formation.EMBO reports · 2023Review
- Bacterial cell-size changes resulting from altering the relative expression of Min proteins.Nature communications · 2023Article
- A lab-on-chip platform for simultaneous culture and electrochemical detection of bacteria.iScience · 2022Article
- Feedback linking cell envelope stiffness, curvature, and synthesis enables robust rod-shaped bacterial growth.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Asymmetric peptidoglycan editing generates cell curvature in Bdellovibrio predatory bacteria.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Article
- Applications of smartphone-based near-infrared (NIR) imaging, measurement, and spectroscopy technologies to point-of-care (POC) diagnostics.Journal of Zhejiang University. Science. B · 2021Review
- Artificial modulation of cell width significantly affects the division time of Escherichia coli.Scientific reports · 2020Article
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Abstract
The boundary of a cell defines the shape and scale of its subcellular organization. However, the effects of the cell's spatial boundaries as well as the geometry sensing and scale adaptation of intracellular molecular networks remain largely unexplored. Here, we show that living bacterial cells can be 'sculpted' into defined shapes, such as squares and rectangles, which are used to explore the spatial adaptation of Min proteins that oscillate pole-to-pole in rod-shaped Escherichia coli to assist cell division. In a wide geometric parameter space, ranging from 2 × 1 × 1 to 11 × 6 × 1 μm(3), Min proteins exhibit versatile oscillation patterns, sustaining rotational, longitudinal, diagonal, stripe and even transversal modes. These patterns are found to directly capture the symmetry and scale of the cell boundary, and the Min concentration gradients scale with the cell size within a characteristic length range of 3-6 μm. Numerical simulations reveal that local microscopic Turing kinetics of Min proteins can yield global symmetry selection, gradient scaling and an adaptive range, when and only when facilitated by the three-dimensional confinement of the cell boundary. These findings cannot be explained by previous geometry-sensing models based on the longest distance, membrane area or curvature, and reveal that spatial boundaries can facilitate simple molecular interactions to result in far more versatile functions than previously understood.
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