RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Genome-wide phenotypic analysis of growth, cell morphogenesis and cell cycle events in Escherichia coli JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 101832 DO 10.1101/101832 A1 Manuel Campos A1 Genevieve Dobihal A1 Christine Jacobs-Wagner YR 2017 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/08/101832.abstract AB Cell size, cell growth and the cell cycle are necessarily intertwined to achieve robust bacterial replication. However, a comprehensive and integrated view of these fundamental processes is lacking. Here, we describe an image-based quantitative screen over the single-gene knockout collection of Escherichia coli, which led to the identification of many new genes involved in cell morphogenesis, population growth, nucleoid (bulk chromosome) dynamics and cell division. Functional analyses, together with high-dimensional classification, unveil new associations of morphological and cell cycle phenotypes with specific functions and pathways. Additionally, correlation analyses across ~4,000 genetic perturbations demonstrate that growth rate is not a determinant of cell size. Cell width and length are also uncorrelated, suggesting that cells do not control their size by monitoring surface area or volume; instead cells appear to regulate width and length independently. Furthermore, our analysis identifies scaling relationships between cell size and nucleoid size and between nucleoid size and the relative timings of nucleoid separation and cell division, linking cell morphogenesis to the cell cycle via the global architecture of the chromosome.