Fig. 2: Results from the observations of reductive division.

a Snapshots taken during the reductive division process of E. coli MG1655 in the EMPS. The medium is switched from LB broth to phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) at t = 0. See also Supplementary Movie 7. b, c Experimental data (blue symbols) for the total cell volume V_tot(t) (b), the growth rate λ(t) (b inset, see also Supplementary Fig. 9a showing the same data in logarithmic scale), the mean cell volume V(t) (c), and the number of the cells n(t) (c inset) in the case of LB → PBS, compared with the simulation results (red curves). The error bars indicate segmentation uncertainty in the image analysis (see “Methods”). t = 0 is the time at which PBS enters the device (black dashed line). The data were collected from 15 wells recorded in a single experiment. d Time evolution of the cell size distributions during starvation in the case of LB → PBS at \(t=0,5,30,60,90,120,180,240,300,360,420,480\ \min\) from right to left. The sample size is n(t) for each distribution (see (c) inset). e Rescaling of the data in (d). The overlapped curves indicate the function F(v/V(t)) in Eq. (2). The dashed line represents the fitted log-normal distribution (σ = 0.34(2)). f The coefficient of variation (CV) and the skewness (Sk) (Eq. (3)) against V(t) = 〈v〉. The error bars were estimated by the bootstrap method with 1000 realizations.