Stochastic and Heritable Responses in Cell-Size Regulation and Survival to pH Stress in C. glutamicum

Acid pulses (pH 4, 20 min) in Corynebacterium glutamicum increase the size added during the stress cycle and yield survival that favors larger cells but shows no detectable lineage heritability.

• Why it matters: Fluctuating pH environments require single-cell recovery and homeostasis, but the link between transient pH shocks, cell-size regulation, and whether stress survival is inherited was unclear.
• What they did: Cells were exposed to short, strong acid or alkaline pulses, while cell-size dynamics and survival were tracked across cycles and compared between sister lineages separated by varying numbers of generations.
• The result: Surviving cells restore size homeostasis and keep their division strategy; sister cell-cycle durations become uncorrelated after ~1.5 generations, while alkaline survival (pH 11, 15 min) favors smaller cells and is transiently heritable up to two generations.

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