  To survive starvation, the bacterium Bacillus subtilis forms durable spores.
The initial step of sporulation is asymmetric cell division, leading to a large
mother-cell and a small forespore compartment. After division is completed and
the dividing septum is thinned, the mother cell engulfs the forespore in a slow
process based on cell-wall degradation and synthesis. However, recently a new
cell-wall independent mechanism was shown to significantly contribute, which
can even lead to fast engulfment in $\sim$ 60 $%$ of the cases when the cell
wall is completely removed. In this backup mechanism, strong ligand-receptor
binding between mother-cell protein SpoIIIAH and forespore-protein SpoIIQ leads
to zipper-like engulfment, but quantitative understanding is missing. In our
work, we combined fluorescence image analysis and stochastic Langevin
simulations of the fluctuating membrane to investigate the origin of fast
bistable engulfment in absence of the cell wall. Our cell morphologies compare
favorably with experimental time-lapse microscopy, with engulfment sensitive to
the number of SpoIIQ-SpoIIIAH bonds in a threshold-like manner. By systematic
exploration of model parameters, we predict regions of osmotic pressure and
membrane-surface tension that produce successful engulfment. Indeed, decreasing
the medium osmolarity in experiments prevents engulfment in line with our
predictions. Forespore engulfment may thus not only be an ideal model system to
study decision-making in single cells, but its biophysical principles are
likely applicable to engulfment in other cell types, e.g. during phagocytosis
in eukaryotes.

Cell Behavior