Biologists Discover How Biological Clock Controls Cell Division in Bacteria

New research provides important clues to how the biological clocks of bacteria and other "prokaryotic" cells. A team of biologists has unraveled the biochemistry of how bacteria so precisely time cell division, a key element in understanding how all organisms from bacteria to humans use their biological clocks to control basic cellular functions.

"A major question in biology is how the circadian clock machinery is different in bacteria than it is in plants, animals and fungi," said Susan Golden, a professor of biology at UC Sana Diego, who headed the study. "We looked at how the biological clock controls when bacterial cells divide-in bacteria, there's a period of four hours where the cells are not allowed to divide-and we identified the structural changes in a key protein that controls this action."

Image credit: Guogang Dong, Haitao Guo, John Buchner and Susan Golden