Abstract
Are there simple quantitative relationships that govern the behaviors of whole organisms? If so, what form do they take? To address these questions, we study growth and division of Caulobacter crescentus, a paradigm for polar cell development and cell cycle control. Using a unique combination of technologies that yields unprecedented statistical precision, we find that their mean sizes grow exponentially in time and that their size distributions collapse to a single curve when rescaled by their means. An analogous result holds for the division-time distributions. We account for these observations with a minimal stochastic model that is based on an autocatalytic cycle. It predicts the scalings, as well as specific functional forms for the universal curves. Our experimental and theoretical analysis reveals a simple physical principle governing these core biological processes: a single timescale governs noisy bacterial growth and division despite the complexity of underlying molecular mechanisms.
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