Book Description

The 1st volume of our Research Topic "The Bacterial Cell: Coupling between Growth, Nucleoid Replication, Cell Division and Shape” was published as an eBook in May 2016 (see: http://journal.frontiersin.org/researchtopic/2905/the-bacterial-cell-coupling-between-growth-nucleoid-replication-cell-division-and-shape). As a sign of growing interest to the topic, two workshops followed the same year: "Stochasticity in the Cell Cycle" in Jerusalem (Israel) by the Hebrew University’s Institute of Advanced Studies and EMBO's "Cell Size Regulation" in Joachimsthal (Germany). From the time of launching the first edition, several new groups have entered the field, and many established groups have made significant advances using state-of-the-art microscopy and microfluidics. Combining these approaches with the techniques pioneered by quantitative microbiologists decades ago, these approaches have provided remarkable amounts of numerical data. Most of these data needed yet to be put into a broader theoretical perspective. Moreover, the molecular mechanisms governing coordination and progression of the main bacterial cell cycle processes have remained largely unknown. These outstanding fundamental questions and the growing interest to the field motivated us to launch the next volume titled “The Bacterial Cell: Coupling between Growth, Nucleoid Replication, Cell Division, and Shape, Volume 2” shortly after completion of the first edition in October 2016. The issue contains 17 contributions from a diverse array of scientists whose field of study spans microbiology, biochemistry, genetics, experimental and theoretical biophysics. The specific questions addressed in the issue include: What triggers initiation of chromosome replication? How is cell division coordinated with replication both spatially and temporally? How is cell size controlled and linked to the rate of mass growth? What role plays physical organization of the chromosomes in their segregation and in regulation of cell division? The publications covering these questions are divided into three topical areas: 1) Cell Cycle Regulation, 2) Growth and Division, and 3) Nucleoid Structure and Replication. New ideas and techniques put forward in these articles bring us closer to understand these fundamental cellular processes, but the quest to resolve them is far from being complete. Plans for the next edition are under way along with further meetings and workshops, e.g., an EMBO Workshop on Bacterial cell biophysics: DNA replication, growth, division, size and shape in Ein Gedi (Israel), May 2020. We hope that via such interdisciplinary exchange of ideas we will come closer to answering the above-mentioned complex and multifaceted questions.