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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Universality of phenotypic distributions in bacteria

Kuheli Biswas and Naama Brenner

  • Department of Chemical Engineering and Network Biology Research Laboratory, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel

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Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022043 – Published 17 May, 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.L022043

Abstract

Some phenotypic properties in bacteria exhibit universal statistics, with distributions collapsing under scaling. The extent and origins of such universality are not well understood. Using phenomenological modeling of growth and division, we identify compound “shape factors” that describe the distributions throughout a large set of single-cell data. We find that the emergence of universal distributions is associated with the robustness of shape factors across conditions, explaining the universality of cell size and highly expressed protein content and the nonuniversality of times between consecutive divisions. A wide range of experimental data sets support our theory quantitatively.

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Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022043– Published 17 May, 2024
  • Received 25 March 2023
  • Accepted 17 April 2024
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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