  Chemotaxis receptors in E. coli form clusters at the cell poles and also
laterally along the cell body, and this clustering plays an important role in
signal transduction. Recently, experiments using flourrescence imaging have
shown that, during cell growth, lateral clusters form at positions
approximately periodically spaced along the cell body. In this paper, we
demonstrate within a lattice model that such spatial organization could arise
spontaneously from a stochastic nucleation mechanism. The same mechanism may
explain the recent observation of periodic aggregates of misfolded proteins in
E. coli.
