Hunting the Cell Cycle Snark

Abstract

In this very personal hunt for the meaning of the bacterial cell cycle, the snark, I briefly revisit and update some of the mechanisms we and many others have proposed to regulate the bacterial cell cycle. These mechanisms, which include the dynamics of calcium, membranes, hyperstructures, and networks, are based on physical and physico-chemical concepts such as ion condensation, phase transition, crowding, liquid crystal immiscibility, collective vibrational modes, reptation, and water availability. I draw on ideas from subjects such as the 'prebiotic ecology' and phenotypic diversity to help with the hunt. Given the fundamental nature of the snark, I would expect that its capture would make sense of other parts of biology. The route, therefore, followed by the hunt has involved trying to answer questions like "why do cells replicate their DNA?", "why is DNA replication semi-conservative?", "why is DNA a double helix?", "why do cells divide?", "is cell division a spandrel?", and "how are catabolism and anabolism balanced?". Here, I propose some relatively unexplored, experimental approaches to testing snark-related hypotheses and, finally, I propose some possibly original ideas about DNA packing, about phase separations, and about computing with populations of virtual bacteria.

Keywords: bacteria; cell division; chromosome replication; condensate; differentiation; hyperstructure; origins of life; phase separation; phenotypic diversity; water.

Figure 1

Approaches to the cellular snark: The spiral represents the route I have taken to the snark, which is itself represented as a supermassive black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy. Techniques that may be useful in exploring a particular approach are in red italics. The image of the black hole was captured by FORS2 on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (https://science.nasa.gov/resource/first-image-of-a-black-hole/). accessed on 21 September 2024.