Theoretische Physik , Universität des Saarlandes , Postfach 151150, 66041 Saarbrücken , Germany.
Interface Focus. 2014 Dec 6;4(6):20140039. doi: 10.1098/rsfs.2014.0039.
The distributions of many proteins in rod-shaped bacteria are far from homogeneous. Often they accumulate at the cell poles or in the cell centre. At the same time, the copy number of proteins in a single cell is relatively small making the patterns noisy. To explore limits to protein patterns due to molecular noise, we studied a generic mechanism for spontaneous polar protein assemblies in rod-shaped bacteria, which are based on cooperative binding of proteins to the cytoplasmic membrane. For mono-polar assemblies, we find that the switching time between the two poles increases exponentially with the cell length and with the protein number. This feature could be beneficial to organelle maintenance in ageing bacteria.
在杆状细菌中，许多蛋白质的分布远非均匀。它们通常聚集在细胞的两极或细胞中心。同时，单个细胞中蛋白质的数量相对较少，使得这些模式具有噪声。为了探索由于分子噪声而导致的蛋白质模式的限制，我们研究了一种基于蛋白质与细胞质膜的协同结合的杆状细菌中自发极性蛋白质组装的通用机制。对于单极组装，我们发现两个极之间的切换时间随细胞长度和蛋白质数量呈指数增长。这一特征可能有利于老化细菌中细胞器的维持。
