ArticleCurrent biology : CB2019
Mechanistic Origin of Cell-Size Control and Homeostasis in Bacteria.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 122 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
122 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 299 citations in OpenAlex.
- Guideline
- Constitutive, endogenous, fluorescent membrane reporters for dynamic cell cycle analysis inApplied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Bacterial growth rate in populations and single cells.Nature microbiology · 2026Review
- Bacterial growth under confinement requires transcriptional adaptation to resist turgor pressure build-up.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Review
- Post-translational modifications of GlmR integrate metabolic and stress signals to maintain cell envelope homeostasis in Bacillus subtilis.PLoS genetics · 2026Article
- Emergent Homeostasis and Degeneracy From Multi-Dimensional Attractors.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2026Review
- Inferring bacterial cell size dynamics across media conditions.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Cell cycle dysregulation of globally important SAR11 bacteria resulting from environmental perturbation.Nature microbiology · 2026Article
- Article
- Maintenance of cytoplasmic and membrane densities shapes cellular geometry in Escherichia coli.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Exploring single-cell biosynthetic noise and dynamics for enhanced betaxanthin production in Escherichia coli.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Extrusion-modulated DnaA activity oscillations coordinate DNA replication with biomass growth.eLife · 2025Article
- Staying in the loop to make ends meet: roles and regulation of GlmR inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Essentialome-Wide Multigenerational Imaging Reveals Mechanistic Origins of Cell Growth Laws.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Nonlinear memory in cell-division dynamics across species.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Uropathogenic Escherichia coli proliferate as a coccoid morphotype inside human host cells.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Gene expression cycles drive non-exponential bacterial growth.Physical review research · 2025Article
- The Escherichia coli replication initiator DnaA is titrated on the chromosome.Nature communications · 2025Article
62 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Evolutionarily divergent bacteria share a common phenomenological strategy for cell-size homeostasis under steady-state conditions. In the presence of inherent physiological stochasticity, cells following this "adder" principle gradually return to their steady-state size by adding a constant volume between birth and division, regardless of their size at birth. However, the mechanism of the adder has been unknown despite intense efforts. In this work, we show that the adder is a direct consequence of two general processes in biology: (1) threshold-accumulation of initiators and precursors required for cell division to a respective fixed number-and (2) balanced biosynthesis-maintenance of their production proportional to volume growth. This mechanism is naturally robust to static growth inhibition but also allows us to "reprogram" cell-size homeostasis in a quantitatively predictive manner in both Gram-negative Escherichia coli and Gram-positive Bacillus subtilis. By generating dynamic oscillations in the concentration of the division protein FtsZ, we were able to oscillate cell size at division and systematically break the adder. In contrast, periodic induction of replication initiator protein DnaA caused oscillations in cell size at initiation but did not alter division size or the adder. Finally, we were able to restore the adder phenotype in slow-growing E. coli, the only known steady-state growth condition wherein E. coli significantly deviates from the adder, by repressing active degradation of division proteins. Together, these results show that cell division and replication initiation are independently controlled at the gene-expression level and that division processes exclusively drive cell-size homeostasis in bacteria. VIDEO ABSTRACT.
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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.