Self-organized periodicity of protein clusters in growing bacteria

TL;DR

This paper presents a lattice model showing that stochastic nucleation can spontaneously produce periodic protein clusters in growing bacteria, explaining recent experimental observations of spatial organization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel stochastic nucleation model that accounts for the spontaneous formation of periodic protein clusters in bacteria.

Findings

Lateral clusters form periodically along the bacterial cell.

The model reproduces experimentally observed spatial patterns.

Periodic aggregation can arise without external cues.

Abstract

Chemotaxis receptors in E. coli form clusters at the cell poles and also laterally along the cell body, and this clustering plays an important role in signal transduction. Recently, experiments using flourrescence imaging have shown that, during cell growth, lateral clusters form at positions approximately periodically spaced along the cell body. In this paper, we demonstrate within a lattice model that such spatial organization could arise spontaneously from a stochastic nucleation mechanism. The same mechanism may explain the recent observation of periodic aggregates of misfolded proteins in E. coli.