The life of all animals is dominated by alternating feelings of hunger and satiety—the main
involuntary motivations for feeding-related behaviour. Gut bacteria depend fully on their host …

Technological advances are enabling the sequencing of environmental DNA and RNA at
increasing depth and with decreasing costs. Metagenomic and transcriptomic analysis of …

Metagenomic sequencing increased our understanding of the role of the microbiome in
health and disease, yet it only provides a snapshot of a highly dynamic ecosystem. Here, we …

The quantitative study of the cell growth [1–5] has led to many fundamental insights in our
understanding of a wide range of subjects, from the cell cycle [6–9] to senescence [10]. Of …

Timely adaptation to nutrient downshift is crucial for bacteria to maintain fitness during feast
and famine cycle in the natural niche. However, the molecular mechanism that ensures the …

Bacterial physiology is a branch of biology that aims to understand overarching principles of
cellular reproduction. Many important issues in bacterial physiology are inherently …

Macromolecular crowding affects the mobility of biomolecules, protein folding and stability,
and the association of macromolecules with each other. Local differences in crowding that …

Proliferation markers, such as proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA), Ki-67, and
thymidine kinase 1 (TK1), have potential as diagnostic tools and as prognostic factors in …

Most bacteria spend the majority of their time in prolonged states of very low metabolic
activity and little or no growth, in which electron donors, electron acceptors and/or nutrients …

It is remarkable how robustly a bacterial species can maintain its preferred size. This
capacity is intimately related to control of the cell cycle: cell size and growth rate determine …