Control of Bacillus subtilis Replication Initiation during Physiological Transitions and Perturbations

Abstract

High-throughput, quantitative approaches have enabled the discovery of fundamental principles describing bacterial physiology. These principles provide a foundation for predicting the behavior of biological systems, a widely held aspiration. However, these approaches are often exclusively applied to the best-known model organism, E. coli . In this report, we investigate to what extent quantitative principles discovered in Gram-negative E. coli are applicable to Gram-positive B. subtilis . We found that these two extremely divergent bacterial species employ deeply similar strategies in order to coordinate growth, cell size, and the cell cycle. These similarities mean that the quantitative physiological principles described here can likely provide a beachhead for others who wish to understand additional, less-studied prokaryotes.