Abstract
A paradigm shift in one field can trigger paradigm shifts in other fields. This is illustrated by the paradigm shifts that have occurred in bacterial physiology following the discoveries that bacteria are not unstructured, that the bacterial cell cycle is not controlled by the dynamics of peptidoglycan, and that the growth rates of bacteria in the same steady-state population are not at all the same. These paradigm shifts are having an effect on longstanding hypotheses about the regulation of the bacterial cell cycle, which appear increasingly to be inadequate. I argue that, just as one earthquake can trigger others, an imminent paradigm shift in the regulation of the bacterial cell cycle will have repercussions or “paradigm quakes” on hypotheses about the origins of life and about the regulation of the eukaryotic cell cycle.
Highlights
A paradigm shift in one field can trigger paradigm shifts in other fields
Paradigm shifts are usually resisted by the community, which sees no need to disrupt the logical and empirical structure of the old paradigm, but which is eventually forced to undergo a shift due to overwhelming inconsistencies between the old paradigm and reality
Life 2019, 9, 27 it was widely believed that bacteria were simple and lacked the high degree of internal structuring characteristic of eukaryotic cells
Summary
A paradigm shift in one field can trigger paradigm shifts in other fields. This is illustrated by the paradigm shifts that have occurred in bacterial physiology following the discoveries that bacteria are not unstructured, that the bacterial cell cycle is not controlled by the dynamics of peptidoglycan, and that the growth rates of bacteria in the same steady-state population are not at all the same. The paradigm has permitted the influential hypothesis of an “initiation mass” since, at different growth rates of the population, the ratio of the mass of the average cell to the number of its origins of replication at the time of initiation could be estimated to be constant [37,38].
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