The mechanism by which bacteria divide is not well understood. Cell division is mediated by filaments of FtsZ and FtsA (FtsAZ) that recruit septal peptidoglycan-synthesizing enzymes to the division site. To understand how these components coordinate to divide cells, we visualized their movements relative to the dynamics of cell wall synthesis during cytokinesis. We found that the division septum was built at discrete sites that moved around the division plane. FtsAZ filaments treadmilled circumferentially around the division ring and drove the motions of the peptidoglycan-synthesizing enzymes. The FtsZ treadmilling rate controlled both the rate of peptidoglycan synthesis and cell division. Thus, FtsZ treadmilling guides the progressive insertion of new cell wall by building increasingly smaller concentric rings of peptidoglycan to divide the cell.

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Cells owe their internal organization to self-organized protein patterns, which originate and adapt to growth and external stimuli via a process that is as complex as it is little understood. Here, we study the emergence, stability, and state transitions of multistable Min protein oscillation patterns in live Escherichia coli bacteria during growth up to defined large dimensions. De novo formation of patterns from homogenous starting conditions is observed and studied both experimentally and in simulations. A new theoretical approach is developed for probing pattern stability under perturbations. Quantitative experiments and simulations show that, once established, Min oscillations tolerate a large degree of intracellular heterogeneity, allowing distinctly different patterns to persist in different cells with the same geometry. Min patterns maintain their axes for hours in experiments, despite imperfections, expansion, and changes in cell shape during continuous cell growth. Transitions between multistable Min patterns are found to be rare events induced by strong intracellular perturbations. The instances of multistability studied here are the combined outcome of boundary growth and strongly nonlinear kinetics, which are characteristic of the reaction–diffusion patterns that pervade biology at many scales.@en

Nanofabricated structures and microfluidic technologies are increasingly being used to study bacteria because of their precise spatial and temporal control. They have facilitated studying many long-standing questions regarding growth, chemotaxis and cell-fate switching, and opened up new areas such as probing the effect of boundary geometries on the subcellular structure and social behavior of bacteria. We review the use of nano/microfabricated structures that spatially separate bacteria for quantitative analyses and that provide topological constraints on their growth and chemical communications. These approaches are becoming modular and broadly applicable, and show a strong potential for dissecting the complex life of bacteria at various scales and engineering synthetic microbial societies.

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The boundary of a cell defines the shape and scale of its subcellular organization. However, the effects of the cell's spatial boundaries as well as the geometry sensing and scale adaptation of intracellular molecular networks remain largely unexplored. Here, we show that living bacterial cells can be 'sculpted' into defined shapes, such as squares and rectangles, which are used to explore the spatial adaptation of Min proteins that oscillate pole-to-pole in rod-shaped Escherichia coli to assist cell division. In a wide geometric parameter space, ranging from 2×1×1× to 11×6×1 μm^3M, Min proteins exhibit versatile oscillation patterns, sustaining rotational, longitudinal, diagonal, stripe and even transversal modes. These patterns are found to directly capture the symmetry and scale of the cell boundary, and the Min concentration gradients scale with the cell size within a characteristic length range of 3-6μm. Numerical simulations reveal that local microscopic Turing kinetics of Min proteins can yield global symmetry selection, gradient scaling and an adaptive range, when and only when facilitated by the three-dimensional confinement of the cell boundary. These findings cannot be explained by previous geometry-sensing models based on the longest distance, membrane area or curvature, and reveal that spatial boundaries can facilitate simple molecular interactions to result in far more versatile functions than previously understood.

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Studies of the spatiotemporal protein dynamics within live bacterial cells impose a strong demand for multi-color imaging. Despite the increasingly large collection of fluorescent protein (FP) variants engineered to date, only a few of these were successfully applied in bacteria. Here, we explore the performance of recently engineered variants with the blue (TagBFP), orange (TagRFP-T, mKO2), and far-red (mKate2) spectral colors by tagging HU, LacI, MinD, and FtsZ for visualizing the nucleoid and the cell division process. We find that, these FPs outperformed previous versions in terms of brightness and photostability at their respective spectral range, both when expressed as cytosolic label and when fused to native proteins. As this indicates that their folding is sufficiently fast, these proteins thus successfully expand the applicable spectra for multi-color imaging in bacteria. A near-infrared protein (eqFP670) is found to be the most red-shifted protein applicable to bacteria so far, with brightness and photostability that are advantageous for cell-body imaging, such as in microfluidic devices. Despite the multiple advantages, we also report the alarming observation that TagBFP directly interacts with TagRFP-T, causing interference of localization patterns between their fusion proteins. Our application of diverse FPs for endogenous tagging provides guidelines for future engineering of fluorescent fusions in bacteria, specifically: (1) The performance of newly developed FPs should be quantified in vivo for their introduction into bacteria; (2) spectral crosstalk and inter-variant interactions between FPs should be carefully examined for multi-color imaging; and (3) successful genomic fusion to the 5'-end of a gene strongly depends on the translational read-through of the inserted coding sequence.@en