Figure 3.
Near-critical-point operation of ParA-mediated PC partition. (A) Experimental setup of two-color live-cell imaging of F plasmids in wild-type E. coli. Cells are observed in phase contrast (top left) and in the blue (top right) and red (bottom right) channels for fluorescence microcopy to observe ParBF-mTq2 or ParAF-mVenus, respectively. Shown is the overlay of blue and red channel (bottom left). Scale bars, 2 μm. (B) Experimental data demonstrate that PC segregation distance adapts to 1/2 of the nucleoid lengths (n = 58). Data from cells grown at 30°C in MGly with or without casamino acids were represented on the same graph because they display the same trend. The segregation distance refers to the instantaneous distance between the two PCs at 10 min after they started to segregate. (C) A representative saltatory trajectory of PC excursion. (D) Non-Gaussian distribution of order parameter ψ (i.e., the maximal PC segregation distance of PC normalized by the nucleoid length within 10-min duration) (n = 60).