Bistable protein distributions in rod-shaped bacteria
  The distributions of many proteins in rod-shaped bacteria are far from homogenous. Often they accumulate at the cell poles or in the cell center. At the same time, the copy number of proteins in a single cell is relatively small making the patterns noisy. To explore limits to protein patterns due to molecular noise, we studied a generic mechanism for spontaneous polar protein assemblies in rod-shaped bacteria, which is based on cooperative binding of proteins to the cytoplasmic membrane. For mono-polar assemblies, we find that the switching time between the two poles increases exponentially with the cell length and with the protein number. 
L. Wettmann, M. Bonny, K. Kruse
q-bio.SC