Cellular dynamics under time-varying conditions

Abstract

Building on the known scaling law that a single timescale, a cellular unit of time, governs stochastic growth and division of individual bacterial cells under constant growth conditions, here we propose that a dynamic rescaling of the cellular unit of time serves to capture the dominant effect of changing conditions on the cell age distribution. This temporal scaling ansatz provides a natural representation for these time-dependent dynamics in whose terms the cell age distribution evolves under time-invariant rules! Finally, we discuss relevance of these results to recent high-precision experiments on individual bacterial cells growing and dividing in dynamic environments.