Dynamics of the peptidoglycan biosynthetic machinery in the stalked budding bacterium Hyphomonas neptunium.

Most commonly studied bacteria grow symmetrically and divide by binary fission, generating two siblings of equal morphology. An exception to this rule are budding bacteria, in which new offspring emerges de novo from a morphologically invariant mother cell. Although this mode of proliferation is widespread in diverse bacterial lineages, the underlying mechanisms are still incompletely understood.