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Bistable protein distributions in rod-shaped bacteria

The distributions of many proteins in rod-shaped bacteria are far from homogenous. Often they accumulate at the cell poles or in the cell center. At the same time, the copy number of proteins in a single cell is relatively small making the patterns noisy. To explore limits to protein patterns due to molecular noise, we studied a generic mechanism for spontaneous polar protein assemblies in rod-shaped bacteria, which is based on cooperative binding of proteins to the cytoplasmic membrane. For mono-polar assemblies, we find that the switching time between the two poles increases exponentially with the cell length and with the protein number.