Isogenic E. coli cells growing in a constant environment display significant variability in growth rates, division sizes, and generation times. The guiding principle appears to be that each cell, during one generation, adds a size increment that is uncorrelated to its birth size. Here, we investigate the mechanisms underlying this "adder" behavior by mapping the chromosome replication cycle to the division cycle of individual cells using fluorescence microscopy. We have found that initiation of chromosome replication is triggered at a fixed volume per chromosome independent of a cell's birth volume and growth rate. Each initiation event is coupled to a division event after a growth-rate-dependent time. We formalize our findings in a model showing that cell-to-cell variation in division timing and cell size is mainly driven by variations in growth rate. The model also explains why fast-growing cells display adder behavior and correctly predict deviations from the adder behavior at slow growth.
The emergence and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are aggravated by incorrect prescription and use of antibiotics. A core problem is that there is no sufficiently fast diagnostic test to guide correct antibiotic prescription at the point of care. Here, we investigate if it is possible to develop a point-of-care susceptibility test for urinary tract infection, a disease that 100 million women suffer from annually and that exhibits widespread antibiotic resistance. We capture bacterial cells directly from samples with low bacterial counts (10 4 cfu/mL) using a custom-designed microfluidic chip and monitor their individual growth rates using microscopy. By averaging the growth rate response to an antibiotic over many individual cells, we can push the detection time to the biological response time of the bacteria. We find that it is possible to detect changes in growth rate in response to each of nine antibiotics that are used to treat urinary tract infections in minutes. In a test of 49 clinical uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) isolates, all were correctly classified as susceptible or resistant to ciprofloxacin in less than 10 min. The total time for antibiotic susceptibility testing, from loading of sample to diagnostic readout, is less than 30 min, which allows the development of a point-of-care test that can guide correct treatment of urinary tract infection.point of care | UTI | AST | antibiotic | resistance | microfluidic
Transcription factors (TFs) mediate gene regulation by site specific binding to chromosomal operators. It is commonly assumed that the level of repression is given by the equilibrium binding of a repressor to its operator alone. However, this assumption has not been possible to test in living cells. Here, we have developed a single molecule chase assay to measure how long an individual transcription factor molecule remains bound at a specific chromosomal operator site. We find that the lac repressor dimer stays bound on average 5 minutes at the native lac operator in Escherichia coli and that a stronger operator results in slower dissociation rate, but similar association rate. Our findings do not support the simple equilibrium model. The discrepancy can for example be accounted for by considering that transcription initiation drives the system out of equilibrium. Such effects need to be considered when predicting gene activity from TF binding strengths.
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