A comprehensive overview of bacterial physiology focusing on the fundamental problems of the field, with extensive reference to milestones that shaped the field from the inception of the field to the most up-to-date developmnent.

We proposed the "unit cell" as the fundamental building block of cell size and its invariance underlies the predictability of cell size using the general growth law.

At long last, and for the first time, we understand the organization, dynamics, segregation of the E. coli chromosome under all growth and cell-cycle conditions in vivo.

All chromosomes must fold to fit within cellular containers. Though strongly confined, the bacterial chromosome exhibits highly dynamic behavior during the cell cycle. Many models have been proposed, but few measurements have quantified the essential micromechanical properties of the bacterial chromosome. In this work, we experimentally demonstrated and quantified the fundamentally soft nature of the bacterial chromosome and the entropic forces that can cause fast compaction in a crowded intracellular environment. This 7-year work, experiment and theory combined, is a quantitative demonstration of the loaded entropic spring model of the bacterial chromosome.

In our PNAS 2006 article, we proposed conformational entropy- driven chromosome organization and segregation in bacteria. This work quantitatively discusses a set of minimal physical conditions the bacterial chromosomes should satisfy to segregate spontaneously, and goes beyond the original PNAS 2006 article. Furthermore, this article critically examines the existing models.

In this work, we introduce the mother machine for the first time. The mother machine allowed us to follow thousands of individual mother cells for hundreds of consecutive generations. The results were surprising. See the movie below.