Criticality and Diversity in a Bacterial Sensory Network
In this thesis, we employ a diverse set of experimental tools to study the Escherichia coli chemotaxis network—a paradigmatic model for signal transduction. Our work centers on two fundamental questions: (1) How can a simple protein network give rise to the complex behavior of critical tuning? (2) How does this same network generate behavioral diversity within clonal populations, how does this diversity evolve during an organism’s lifetime, and how do individual bacteria exploit this diversity to adapt to different environments?
