Regulatory mechanisms in fluctuating or stressful environments

Identify the regulatory mechanisms that govern cellular responses to fluctuating or stressful environments within quantitative growth-law and proteome-allocation frameworks for bacteria and other organisms, in order to explain how resource allocation and gene expression are reprogrammed under environmental variability.

Background

The tutorial outlines the landscape of growth laws that link cellular physiology to growth rate and emphasizes their extension beyond steady-state conditions. While many empirical relationships have been established, the authors stress that understanding how cells sense and respond under variable or stressful conditions remains unresolved.

This problem targets the mechanistic basis of regulation under environmental variability, which is essential for connecting coarse-grained proteome allocation theories with detailed models of sensing and gene-expression control.

References

Many open questions remain, e.g.: Which regulatory mechanisms determine responses in fluctuating or stressful environments? To what extent are growth laws conserved across organisms? Can we integrate growth laws for population averages with single-cell observations to uncover new complexities? Can the framework developed for describing physiology be extended to ecologically interacting organisms? What are the evolutionary drivers behind these laws, and what constraints do they impose? We believe these questions will drive many of the future advances in quantitative biology.

— The Hands-On Growth Laws Theory Cookbook (2507.19194 - Droghetti et al., 25 Jul 2025) in Section 1, A Brief Introduction to Growth laws (Where is the frontier?)