Caulobase

Caulobase · a reference for

Caulobacter crescentus

A freshwater bacterium that divides into two different cells: a stalked cell that stays attached and copies its chromosome, and a swimming swarmer cell that must first differentiate before it can. That built-in asymmetry made it a model for how a single cell organises itself in time and space.

Dedicated to Lucy Shapiro and Harley McAdams, whose work turned this cell cycle into a regulatory circuit that can be read and simulated.

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Fig. 1 One cycle, computed frame by frame. Green foci mark the chromosome origin region, the way a fluorescent ParB fusion shows it: one at the old pole, then a copy that crosses to the new pole once replication starts. The traces are schematic levels of each regulator's active form, redrawn qualitatively after Holtzendorff et al. 2004; Collier et al. 2006; Collier et al. 2007; McAdams & Shapiro 2003; they show order and timing, not measured concentrations.

Contents

  1. History35 milestones

    From the stalked bacteria of the 1930s to phase-separated polar condensates: how a pond bacterium became a model for cellular organisation.

  2. Lucy Shapiro & Harley McAdamstribute

    A developmental biologist and a physicist who turned the Caulobacter cell cycle into a circuit that can be read, simulated and reasoned about.

  3. Key papers90 papers

    A curated bibliography, every entry checked against PubMed and Crossref, filterable by topic, with BibTeX for all of it.

  4. Datasets & resources61 entries

    Genomes, transcriptomes, ChIP, Tn-seq fitness, Hi-C, methylomes, databases and strains, each with its accession and source paper.

  5. Cell-cycle network34 components · 66 interactions

    The core regulatory circuit, live: follow CtrA, DnaA, GcrA and CcrM through the cycle and open the evidence behind every arrow.

  6. Pathways7 modules

    Chromosome segregation, division-site selection, flagellum and holdfast, c-di-GMP signalling and stress responses, stepped through stage by stage.

At a glance

Life cycle
Dimorphic. Every division yields a sessile stalked cell, which can replicate its chromosome at once, and a flagellated swarmer cell, which cannot until it differentiates. source
Habitat
Fresh water; the genus was named in a study of freshwater stalked bacteria (Henrici & Johnson 1935). source
Genome · NA1000
One circular chromosome, 4,042,929 bp, 67.2% GC (RefSeq NC_011916.1). source
Genome · CB15
4,016,947 bp, 67.2% GC (RefSeq NC_002696.2); 3,767 genes in the first annotation (Nierman et al. 2001). source
Essential genome
1,012 essential features at 8-bp resolution, including 480 open reading frames (Christen et al. 2011). source
Cell-cycle transcription
553 genes (19% of the genome) vary with the cell cycle (Laub et al. 2000). source