Fig. 7
Comparison of steady state levels of key system components within curli-off and curli-on phenotypes depending on switching behaviour. Panel a (upper figure row): steady state levels of system components are shown as indicated above each subfigure for parameter sets inducing bistability with frequent switching (\(\mathcal {P}\geq 0.9\), blue) and rare switching (\(\mathcal {P} \leq 0.1\), red) between curli-off and curli-on states. Within each of these two groups the steady state levels of curli-on and curli-off states are shown (filled, downwards pointing triangles and empty, upwards pointing triangles, respectively). The steady state levels were computed using the ODE system (1) and, for consistency, compared with the modes of the solution of the Chemical Master Equation obtained by SSA sampling (Additional file 5: Figure S3). Panel b (lower figure row): the absolute difference between the molecular levels of system components between the curli-on and curli-off states is shown. The difference of molecular levels is computed for parameter sets inducing high and low probability of switching (blue and red hexagrams, respectively) between the curli-on and curli-off states. The p-values indicate the significance of the separation between the two distributions (Wilcoxon ranksum test)