Seminar by Suckjoon Jun

The origin of Schaechter, Maaloe, Kjeldgaard 1958

In 1958, Ole Maaloe's group published two papers that signaled the beginning of the first golden era of bacterial physiology. One of the main results in the papers is known as the 'growth law', which states that the average cell size of a steady-state population has an exponential dependence on the nutrient-imposed growth rate. The growth law is one of the rare, quantitative principles, which is robust to the details of the experimental systems. It also allows predictions like the Kepler's laws do in physics. For a long time, however, the origin of the growth law was not understood. In this talk, I will present some of the recent progress on the fundamental principles in quantitative bacterial physiology, and how we are entering its second golden era, more than after 50 years of the work by the Copenhagen School of Bacterial Phyiology.