Experiments on steady-state bacterial cultures have uncovered several quantitative regularities at the system level. These include, first, the exponential growth of cell size with time and the balanced growth of intracellular chemicals between cell birth and division, which are puzzling given the nonlinear and decentralized chemical dynamics in the cell. We model a cell as a set of chemical populations undergoing nonlinear mass action kinetics in a container whose volume is a linear function of the chemical populations. This turns out to be a special class of dynamical systems that generically has attractors in which all populations grow exponentially with time at the same rate. This explains exponential balanced growth of bacterial cells without invoking any regulatory mechanisms and suggests that this could be a robust property of protocells as well. Second, we consider the hypothesis that cells commit themselves to division when a certain internal chemical population reaches a threshold of $N$ molecules. We show that this hypothesis leads to a simple explanation of some of the variability observed across cells in a bacterial culture. In particular, it reproduces the adder property of cell size fluctuations observed recently in E. coli; the observed correlations among interdivision time, birth volume, and added volume in a generation; and the observed scale of the fluctuations (CV $\approx$ 10–30%) when $N$ is between 10 and 100. Third, upon including a suitable regulatory mechanism that optimizes the growth rate of the cell, the model reproduces the observed bacterial growth laws including the dependence of the growth rate and ribosomal protein fraction on the medium. Thus, the models provide a framework for unifying diverse aspects of bacterial growth physiology under one roof. They also suggest new questions for experimental and theoretical enquiry.

• Received 12 February 2019
• Revised 2 April 2020
• Accepted 3 April 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.101.062406