Non-Equilibrium Polar Localization of Proteins in Bacterial Cells
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many proteins are observed to localize to the poles within bacterial cells. Some bacteria show unipolar localization, yet under different conditions bipolar patterns can emerge. One mechanism for spontaneous polar localization has been shown to involve the combination of protein aggregation and nucleoid occlusion. Whether the different observed patterns represent global energy minima for the cellular system remains to be determined. In this paper we show that for a model consisting only of protein aggregation along with an excluded volume effect due to the DNA polymer, that unipolar patterns are the global energy ground state regardless of protein concentration and DNA density. We extend the model to allow for proteins to be added to the cellular volume at a constant rate and show that bipolar (or multi-foci) patterns emerge as the result of the system being kinetically trapped in a local energy minimum. Lastly we also consider the situation of a growing cell that starts with a pre-existing aggregate at one of the poles and determine conditions under which either unipolar or bipolar patterns can exist at the point when it is ready to divide. This work sheds new interpretations on recently published experimental data and suggests experiments to test whether such a mechanism can drive patterning in bacteria.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it