Plasticity of growth laws tunes resource allocation strategies in bacteria
Fig 6
Nutrient quality as a map of environments and mediator of resource allocation strategies.
Ecological niches in which bacteria like E. coli evolved consist of many strikingly different environments, each coming with their own set of payoffs and hazards. The trajectory in which the bacterium transitions between these environments is partly governed by its natural life cycle, but also has a probabilistic component. To maximize their fitness, bacteria need to identify the environment in which they find themselves and adjust proteome resource allocation strategies accordingly. Nutrients allow bacteria to grow, but they also serve as a major signal that allows microbes to infer information about their environment. Nutrient quality encoded in regulatory architecture and enzymatic properties that were shaped by evolution, serves both as a map of the safety and reliability of the environment and as a regulatory mechanism implementing proteome allocation decisions. The conservation of this simple regulatory architecture across environments is what gives rise to the striking bacterial growth laws and their elegant predictions. (Illustration created with Biorender).