The right answer is C) The cell's growth would speed up significantly, leading to shorter periods of time between cell division.
Depending on the environmental conditions, a bacterium exists under two main conditions:
(i) the vegetative state during which balanced biosyntheses are ensured allowing more or less rapid growth.
(ii) the state of rest characterized by a minimum of exchange with the external environment and a survival without multiplication.
In bacteria growth can result in an increase in cell volume, but it leads mainly to an increase in the number of cells.
The state of rest is a precarious state that requires the absence of lethal conditions and the presence of a minimum of assimilable substrates to ensure the basic metabolism of the cell. In a resting population, there is always a mortality rate, the importance of which depends on the prevailing conditions. Under optimum storage conditions (lyophilization or freezing at -70 ° C) the mortality rate is low but it is not zero.
To ensure its growth or survival, a bacterium must find in its environment what satisfy its nutritional needs: energetic substances allowing the cell to achieve the synthesis of its constituents and elemental substances or materials constituting the cell.
