Abstract
The dynamics of the Min-protein system help Escherichia coli regulate the process of cell division by identifying the center of the cell. While this system exhibits robust bipolar oscillations in wild-type cell shapes, recent experiments have shown that when the cells are mechanically deformed into wide, flattened out, irregular shapes, the spatial regularity of these oscillations breaks down. We employ widely used stochastic and deterministic models of the Min system to simulate cells with flattened shapes. The deterministic model predicts strong bipolar oscillations, in contradiction with the experimentally observed behavior, while the stochastic model, which is based on the same reaction-diffusion equations, predicts more spatially irregular oscillations. We further report simulations of flattened but more symmetric shapes, which suggest that the flattening and lateral expansion may contribute as much to the irregular oscillation behavior as the asymmetry of the cell shapes.
Highlights
It is vital that during the process of bacterial cell division a cell avoid minicelling, or splitting into daughter cells with lopsided volumes. Instrumental to this process in Escherichia coli is a long FtsZ polymer chain that develops near the cell wall in the center region of the cell, helping dictate the plane of division [1, 2]
We mean to investigate the geometric limits of the Min system oscillations as observed by Männik et al.[13], so we have modeled the Min system in several cell shapes and sizes
We find qualitative agreement between our stochastic simulations and experiments showing disrupted bipolar MinD oscillation in asymmetric flattened E. coli cells [13]
Summary
It is vital that during the process of bacterial cell division a cell avoid minicelling, or splitting into daughter cells with lopsided volumes Instrumental to this process in Escherichia coli is a long FtsZ polymer chain that develops near the cell wall in the center region of the cell, helping dictate the plane of division [1, 2]. Previous experimental studies have shown that the MinC protein, known to inhibit the FtsZ polymer [3], exhibits regular pole to pole oscillatory behavior between both ends of the wild-type pill-shaped cell. It has a higher time averaged concentration in the cell poles than in the center region, which aides in preventing the FtsZ from developing in the wrong region.
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