Emergent Simplicities in the Living Histories of Individual Cells

Organisms maintain the status quo, holding key physiological variables constant to within an acceptable tolerance, and yet adapt with precision and plasticity to dynamic changes in externalities. What organizational principles ensure such exquisite yet robust control of systems-level “state variables” in complex systems with an extraordinary number of moving parts and fluctuating variables? In this talk I will focus on these issues in the specific context of intra- and intergenerational life histories of individual bacterial cells, whose biographies are precisely charted via high-precision dynamic experiments using our SChemostat*** technology. I will highlight intra- and inter- generational scaling laws and other “emergent simplicities” revealed by these high-precision data. In turn, these facilitate a principled route to dimensional reduction of the problem and serve as essential building blocks for phenomenological and mechanistic theory. Parameter-free data-theory matches for multiple organisms validate theory frameworks and explicate the systems physics of stochastic homeostasis and adaptation. Next I turn my attention to the signatures of the onset of catastrophe, and will touch upon the rich system physics characterizing the stochasticity driven transition from homeostasis to breakdown. The intergenerational scaling law (above) not only uniquely determines the stochastic map governing homeostasis, but also offers quantitative insights into the transition from the “conspiracy principle” regime (homeostasis) to the “catastrophe principle” regime and then to system breakdown.

*** ‘Sri and Charlie’s chemostat’!

References:

[1] Emergent Simplicities in the Living Histories of Individual Cells, Charles S. Wright^, Kunaal Joshi^, Rudro R. Biswas**, Srividya Iyer-Biswas**, Annual Reviews Cond Matt Phys. 16, 253-73, arXiv:2404.01682 (2024)

[2] Stochasticity induced transition from homeostasis to catastrophe: Rudro R. Biswas**, Charles S. Wright, Kunaal Joshi, Srividya Iyer-Biswas**, arXiv:2410.17414 (2024)

^Equal contributions

**Corresponding authors