What do single E. coli cells do when they lose nutrients?

Although most studies in microbiology focus on exponentially growing cells, it is believed that in the wild bacteria spend most of their time slowly starving to death.
What happens to bacterial cells during starvation? What happens to gene expression? What determines whether cells die or survive? In this talk I will discuss several insights that we gained regarding these questions and relate them to findings from others. Several key insights that I will discuss include:
Upon loss of nutrients, cells activate a specific regulatory program that is highly reproducible across single cells.
This regulatory program dramatically remodels the proteome during the first 5-10 hours of starvation, after which phenotypes are near ‘frozen’.
This remodeling is crucial for the stress resistance and survival of cells during starvation.
Like growth rates, the rates at which cells die varies strongly across strains and precise starvation conditions.

Host: Prof. Dr. Hannes Link

Seminar Room Level 2 in M3