Bacteria within an isoclonal population display significant heterogeneity in metabolism, even under tightly controlled environmental conditions. Metabolic heterogeneity enables influential functions not possible or measurable at the ensemble scale. Several molecular and cellular mechanisms are likely to give rise to metabolic heterogeneity including molecular noise in metabolic enzyme expression, positive feedback loops, and asymmetric partitioning of cellular components during cell division. Dissection of the mechanistic origins of metabolic heterogeneity has been enabled by recent developments in single-cell analytical tools. Finally, we provide a discussion of recent studies examining the importance of metabolic heterogeneity in applied settings such as infectious disease and metabolic engineering.

中文翻译：

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细菌代谢异质性：工程和传染病的起源和应用。

即使在严格控制的环境条件下，等克隆种群中的细菌在代谢方面也表现出显着的异质性。代谢异质性使在整体尺度上不可能或无法测量的有影响的功能成为可能。几种分子和细胞机制可能会引起代谢异质性，包括代谢酶表达中的分子噪声、正反馈回路和细胞分裂过程中细胞成分的不对称分配。单细胞分析工具的最新发展使得对代谢异质性机制起源的剖析成为可能。最后，我们讨论了最近研究代谢异质性在传染病和代谢工程等应用环境中的重要性的研究。