Mapping out Min protein patterns in fully confined fluidic chambers
Abstract
The bacterial Min protein system provides a major model system for studying reaction-diffusion processes in biology. Here we present the first in vitro study of the Min system in fully confined three-dimensional chambers that are lithography-defined, lipid-bilayer coated and isolated through pressure valves. We identify three typical dynamical behaviors that occur dependent on the geometrical chamber parameters: pole-to-pole oscillations, spiral rotations, and traveling waves. We establish the geometrical selection rules and show that, surprisingly, Min-protein spiral rotations govern the larger part of the geometrical phase diagram. Confinement as well as an elevated temperature reduce the characteristic wavelength of the Min patterns, although even for confined chambers with a bacterial-level viscosity, the patterns retain a ~5 times larger wavelength than in vivo. Our results provide an essential experimental base for modeling of intracellular Min gradients in bacterial cell division as well as, more generally, for understanding pattern formation in reaction-diffusion systems.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Frontiers of Nanoscience program)
- Yaron Caspi
- Cees Dekker
European Research Council (No. 669598)
- Yaron Caspi
- Cees Dekker
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- David Sprinzak, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Version history
- Received: June 30, 2016
- Accepted: November 24, 2016
- Accepted Manuscript published: November 25, 2016 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: January 5, 2017 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2016, Caspi & Dekker
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,125
- views
-
- 469
- downloads
-
- 55
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Physics of Living Systems
Despite long-running efforts to increase gender diversity among tenured and tenure-track faculty in the U.S., women remain underrepresented in most academic fields, sometimes dramatically so. Here, we quantify the relative importance of faculty hiring and faculty attrition for both past and future faculty gender diversity using comprehensive data on the training and employment of 268,769 tenured and tenure-track faculty rostered at 12,112U.S. PhD-granting departments, spanning 111 academic fields between 2011 and 2020. Over this time, we find that hiring had a far greater impact on women’s representation among faculty than attrition in the majority (90.1%) of academic fields, even as academia loses a higher share of women faculty relative to men at every career stage. Finally, we model the impact of five specific policy interventions on women’s representation, and project that eliminating attrition differences between women and men only leads to a marginal increase in women’s overall representation—in most fields, successful interventions will need to make substantial and sustained changes to hiring in order to reach gender parity.
-
- Cell Biology
- Physics of Living Systems
An influx of water molecules can help immune cells called neutrophils to move to where they are needed in the body.