Berlin 2015 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 41: Protein structure and dynamics I

BP 41.9: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 19. März 2015, 12:15–12:30, H 1058

Effects of molecular noise on bistable protein distributions in rod-shaped bacteria — •Lukas Wettmann, Mike Bonny, and Karsten Kruse — Theoretische Physik, Universität des Saarlandes, Postfach 151150, 66041 Saarbrücken, Germany

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.