Subpopulations of sensorless bacteria drive fitness in fluctuating environments.

ABSTRACT: Populations of bacteria often undergo a lag in growth when switching conditions. Because growth lags can be large compared to typical doubling times, variations in growth lag are an important but often overlooked component of bacterial fitness in fluctuating environments. We here explore how growth lag variation is determined for the archetypical switch from glucose to lactose as a carbon source in Escherichia coli. First, we show that single-cell lags are bimodally distributed and controlled by a single-molecule trigger. That is, gene expression noise causes the population before the switch to divide into subpopulations with zero and nonzero lac operon expression. While "sensorless" cells with zero preexisting lac expression at the switch have long lags because they are unable to sense th

SUBMITTER: Julou T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7738171 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature