Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 22: Posters - Statistical Physics of Biological Systems
DY 22.10: Poster
Tuesday, March 21, 2017, 14:00–16:00, P1A
Stochastic switching of of Min proteins in short Escherichia coli cells — •Lukas Wettmann1 and Karsten Kruse2 — 1Theoretische Physik, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany — 2NCCR Chemical Biology, Department of Biochemistry, Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Intracellular processes are subjected to noise, be it through thermal fluctuations or, for example, molecular noise. The latter case is especially true when the total number of involved molecules inside the cell is low. More interesting than the, for the case of gene expression, local changes in protein number is the stochastic behavior of spatially inhomogeneous protein distributions inside the cell.
To this end, we study the influence of noise on the dynamics of the Min system. The Min proteins are a family of proteins which through self-organization are able to exert spatial pole-to-pole oscillations in rod-shaped E. coli cells. These oscillations cause the division site to be located along the symmetry axis of the cell, ensuring equal-sized daughter cells. In contrast, for short cells, the oscillations are replaced by stochastic switching of the proteins between two stable polar configurations. This behaviour can cause the emergence of mini cells if the residence times are sufficiently long.
We developed a mechanism based on the underlying molecular processes to study the dynamics of the Min proteins. With this mechanism, we are able to use a framework developed in earlier work to analyze the behaviour of the Min proteins in the limit of weak noise and calculate the residence times as a function of the cell length.