Nanoblog

Although bacteria in the wild likely spend the majority of their time in non-growing states, relatively little is known about cell physiology and gene expression in such states, especially at the single-cell level. For instance, it is not known whether constant population size during stationary phase corresponds to the fact that all cells stopped growing and dividing, or to a balance between slow growth and mortality. It has also been reported that constitutive genes remain expressed at low level in such conditions, but it is not clear yet how this production is balanced so that protein concentration appears to be stable.

When studying the behavior of bacteria in the laboratory, cells are almost always grown at high or saturating concentrations of their nutrients, not only because this allows fast growth, but also because it allows sufficiently large cell numbers to measure using bulk assays. However, it is believed that, out in the real world, bacteria often have to deal with trace amounts of nutrients at very low concentrations. Thus, the ability of different microbes to colonize ecological niches and compete with others will crucially depend on how much and fast they can grow on low concentrations of nutrients.