Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow,
reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic …

All mammalian cells live in the aqueous medium, yet for many cell biologists, water is a
passive arena in which proteins are the leading players that carry out essential biological …

Bacterial cytokinesis is accomplished by the essential 'divisome'machinery. The most widely
conserved divisome component, FtsZ, is a tubulin homolog that polymerizes into the 'FtsZ …

Cell walls define a cell's shape in bacteria. The walls are rigid to resist large internal
pressures, but remarkably plastic to adapt to a wide range of external forces and geometric …

Bacteria face the challenging requirement to maintain their shape and avoid rupture due to
the high internal turgor pressure, but simultaneously permit the import and export of …

Bacterial cell shapes are manifestations of programs carried out by multi‐protein machines
that synthesize and remodel the resilient peptidoglycan (PG) mesh and other polymers …

The rod is a ubiquitous shape adopted by walled cells from diverse organisms ranging from
bacteria to fungi to plants. Although rod-like shapes are found in cells of vastly different sizes …

During envelope stress, critical inner-membrane functions are preserved by the phage-
shock-protein (Psp) system, a stress response that emerged from work with Escherichia coli …

Permeable vesicles containing the proto-ring anchoring ZipA protein shrink when FtsZ, the
main cell division protein, polymerizes in the presence of GTP. Shrinkage, resembling the …

Diversification of cell size is hypothesized to have occurred through a process of
evolutionary optimization, but direct demonstrations of causal relationships between cell …