Gram-positive and Gram-negative Bacteria Share Common Principles To Coordinate Growth and the Cell Cycle At the Single-cell Level

Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli are evolutionarily divergent model organisms that have elucidated fundamental differences between Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, respectively. Despite their differences in cell cycle control at the molecular level, both organisms follow the same phenomenological principle for cell size homeostasis known as the adder. We thus asked to what extent B. subtilis and E. coli share common physiological principles in coordinating growth and the cell cycle. To answer this question, we measured physiological parameters of B. subtilis under various steady-state growth conditions with and without translation inhibition at both population and single-cell level. These experiments revealed core shared physiological principles between B. subtilis and E. coli. Specifically, we show that both organisms maintain an invariant cell size per replication origin at initiation, with and without growth inhibition, and even during nutrient shifts at the single-cell level. Furthermore, both organisms also inherit the same “hierarchy” of physiological parameters ranked by their coefficient of variation. Based on these findings, we suggest that the basic coordination principles between growth and the cell cycle in bacteria may have been established in the very early stages of evolution.