A Mes­sage to the At­ten­dees

With kind per­mis­sion by the or­ga­niz­ers, we re­pro­duce here Elio's mes­sage to the at­ten­dees of the meet­ing on 'Ma­jor ideas in quan­ti­ta­tive mi­cro­bial phys­i­ol­ogy: Past, Present and Fu­ture' held in June this year in Køben­havn, Den­mark.

by Elio

The fu­ture of bac­te­r­ial growth phys­i­ol­ogy ap­pears to be as bright as ever. It ben­e­fits, among other things, from the in­creased abil­ity to study bac­te­ria in na­ture, from ad­vanced tech­niques in op­ti­cal and elec­tron mi­croscopy, and from the height­ened use of com­pu­ta­tional analy­sis. Bac­terial phy­sio­logy is be­ing comin­gled with sys­tems bi­ol­ogy (a term that is per­haps los­ing some of its lus­ter).
 

Cof­fee break at the #CopenhagenQBio22 meet­ing. Fron­tispiece: in­side the lec­ture hall of Carls­berg Acad­emy, Copen­hagen. Pho­to credit Christoph Weigel

We are learn­ing more and more about the in­ter­ac­tions in liv­ing cells be­tween and among mi­cro- and macro-mole­cules, the go­ings-on dur­ing the cell cy­cle, the sto­chas­tic­ity of pre­vious­ly thought to be ho­mo­ge­neous pop­u­la­tions, and other such en­tic­ing phe­nom­ena. In re­cent years, there has been a most wel­come re-en­try of physi­cists to bi­ol­ogy. They bring along novel ways of think­ing as well as ad­vanced tech­nologies and yen for model mak­ing.

But old ba­sic ques­tions re­main. Why do bac­te­ria (E. coli at least) have so many over­lap­ping reg­u­la­tory mech­a­nisms? What are the rules that gov­ern that? How is it pos­si­ble that, un­like what hap­pens in eu­kary­otic cells, in bac­te­ria the ma­jor macromole­cular fac­to­ries can, to a lim­ited ex­tent, op­er­ate in iso­la­tion for one an­other? In the broad­est terms, ques­tions re­lated to ecol­ogy and evo­lu­tion ap­pear to be cease­less. I am sure that were I to at­tend the meet­ing, I would find that the num­ber of top­ics that de­serve at­ten­tion has mul­ti­plied signifi­cantly. And so the ex­cite­ment in this field con­tin­ues un­abated.

Please en­joy the meet­ing.