Non-genetic inheritance restraint of cell-to-cell variation
- University of Pittsburgh, United States
Abstract
Heterogeneity in physical and functional characteristics of cells (e.g. size, cycle time, growth rate, protein concentration) proliferates within an isogenic population due to stochasticity in intracellular biochemical processes and in the distribution of resources during divisions. Conversely, it is limited in part by the inheritance of cellular components between consecutive generations. Here we introduce a new experimental method for measuring proliferation of heterogeneity in bacterial cell characteristics, based on measuring how two sister cells become different from each other over time. Our measurements provide the inheritance dynamics of different cellular properties, and the 'inertia' of cells to maintain these properties along time. We find that inheritance dynamics are property-specific, and can exhibit long-term memory (~10 generations) that works to restrain variation among cells. Our results can reveal mechanisms of non-genetic inheritance in bacteria and help understand how cells control their properties and heterogeneity within isogenic cell populations.
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study, are available on Zenodo at 10.5281/zenodo.4476617
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (2016376)
- Hanna Salman
National Science Foundation (2014116)
- Hanna Salman
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Vashistha et al.
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
-
- 3,133
- views
-
- 376
- downloads
-
- 28
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Citations by DOI
-
- 28
- citations for umbrella DOI https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.64779
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
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)
Non-genetic inheritance restraint of cell-to-cell variation
eLife 10:e64779.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.64779
