@article {Zheng795013, author = {Hai Zheng and Yang Bai and Meiling Jiang and Taku A. Tokuyasu and Xiongliang Huang and Fajun Zhong and Xiongfei Fu and Nancy Kleckner and Terence Hwa and Chenli Liu}, title = {A general quantitative relation linking bacterial cell growth and the cell cycle}, elocation-id = {795013}, year = {2019}, doi = {10.1101/795013}, publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory}, abstract = {The foundation of bacterial cell cycle studies has long resided in two interconnected dogmas between biomass growth, DNA replication, and cell division during exponential growth: the SMK growth law that relates cell mass (a measure of cell size) to growth rate1, and Donachie{\textquoteright}s hypothesis of a growth-rate-independent initiation mass2. These dogmas have spurred many efforts to understand their molecular bases and physiological consequences3{\textendash}12. Most of these studies focused on fast-growing cells, with doubling times shorter than 60 min. Here, we systematically studied the cell cycle of E. coli for a broad range of doubling times (24 min to over 10 hr), with particular attention on steady-state growth. Surprisingly, we observed that neither dogma held across the range of growth rates examined. In their stead, a new linear relation unifying the slow- and fast-growth regimes was revealed between the cell mass and the number of cell divisions it takes to replicate and segregate a newly initiated pair of replication origins. This and other findings in this study suggest a single-cell division model, which not only reproduces the bulk relations observed but also recapitulates the adder phenomenon established recently for stochastically dividing cells13{\textendash}15. These results allowed us to develop quantitative insight into the bacterial cell cycle, providing a firm new foundation for the study of bacterial growth physiology.}, URL = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/10/06/795013}, eprint = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/10/06/795013.full.pdf}, journal = {bioRxiv} }