Speed variations of bacterial replisomes
Abstract
Replisomes are multi-protein complexes that replicate genomes with remarkable speed and accuracy. Despite their importance, their dynamics is poorly characterized, especially in vivo. In this paper, we present an approach to infer the replisome dynamics from the DNA abundance distribution measured in a growing bacterial population. Our method is sensitive enough to detect subtle variations of the replisome speed along the genome. As an application, we experimentally measured the DNA abundance distribution in Escherichia coli populations growing at different temperatures using deep sequencing. We find that the average replisome speed increases nearly five-fold between 17°C and 37°C. Further, we observe wave-like variations of the replisome speed along the genome. These variations correlate with previously observed variations of the mutation rate, suggesting a common dynamical origin. Our approach has the potential to elucidate replication dynamics in E. coli mutants and in other bacterial species.
Data availability
Sequence reads were deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive with links to BioProject accession number PRJNA772106. Corresponding read frequencies along the genome were deposited in Zenodo (DOI:10.5281/zenodo.5577986).
-
Escherichia coli DNA replication study: processed alignment datadoi: 10.5281/zenodo.5577986.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JP18K03473)
- Simone Pigolotti
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Projektnummer 452628014,Geschätszeichen: HA9374/1-1)
- Samuel Hauf
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2022, Bhat 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
-
- 1,920
- views
-
- 460
- downloads
-
- 11
- 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
-
- Developmental Biology
- Physics of Living Systems
Shape changes of epithelia during animal development, such as convergent extension, are achieved through the concerted mechanical activity of individual cells. While much is known about the corresponding large-scale tissue flow and its genetic drivers, fundamental questions regarding local control of contractile activity on the cellular scale and its embryo-scale coordination remain open. To address these questions, we develop a quantitative, model-based analysis framework to relate cell geometry to local tension in recently obtained time-lapse imaging data of gastrulating Drosophila embryos. This analysis systematically decomposes cell shape changes and T1 rearrangements into internally driven, active, and externally driven, passive, contributions. Our analysis provides evidence that germ band extension is driven by active T1 processes that self-organize through positive feedback acting on tensions. More generally, our findings suggest that epithelial convergent extension results from the controlled transformation of internal force balance geometry which combines the effects of bottom-up local self-organization with the top-down, embryo-scale regulation by gene expression.