Related papers: Cell size control in bacteria is modulated through…
A ubiquitous feature of living cells is their growth over time followed by division into daughter cells. How isogenic cell populations maintain size homeostasis, i.e., a narrow distribution of cell size, is an intriguing fundamental…
Single-cell experiments revealed substantial variability in generation times, growth rates but also in birth and division sizes between genetically identical cells. Understanding how these fluctuations determine the fitness of the…
Our understanding of cell division control in bacteria still relies largely on interpreting correlations between phenomenological variables, with limited connection to the underlying molecular mechanisms. Here, we analytically solve a…
Cells employ control strategies to maintain a stable size. Dividing at a target size (the `sizer' strategy) is thought to produce the tightest size distribution. However, this result follows from phenomenological models that ignore the…
Organisms across all domains of life regulate the size of their cells. However, the means by which this is done is poorly understood. We study two abstracted "molecular" models for size regulation: inhibitor dilution and initiator…
The mechanism of bacterial cell size control has been a mystery for decades, which involves the well-coordinated growth and division in the cell cycle. The revolutionary modern techniques of microfluidics and the advanced live imaging…
Cells control their size to cope with noise during growth and division. Eukaryotic cells exhibiting "sizer" control (targeting a specific size before dividing) may rely on molecular concentration thresholds, but simple implementations of…
Cell size control is crucial for maintaining cellular function and homeostasis. In this study, we develop a first-order partial differential equation model to examine the effects of three key size control mechanisms: the sizer, timer, and…
How exponentially growing cells maintain size homeostasis is an important fundamental problem. Recent single-cell studies in prokaryotes have uncovered the adder principle, where cells on average, add a fixed size (volume) from birth to…
Cells maintain a stable size as they grow and divide. Inspired by the available experimental data, most proposed models for size homeostasis assume size control mechanisms that act on a timescale of one generation. Such mechanisms lead to…
Cell growth in size is a complex process coordinated by intrinsic and environmental signals. In a recent work [Tzur et al., Science, 2009, 325:167-171], size distributions in an exponentially growing population of mammalian cells were used…
Fundamental mechanisms governing cell size control and homeostasis are still poorly understood. The relationship between sizes at division and birth in single cells is used as a metric to categorize the basis of size homeostasis [1-3].…
Microbial growth and division are fundamental processes relevant to many areas of life science. Of particular interest are homeostasis mechanisms, which buffer growth and division from accumulating fluctuations over multiple cycles. These…
We study the effect of correlations in generation times on the dynamics of population growth of microorganisms. We show that any non-zero correlation that is due to cell-size regulation, no matter how small, induces long-term oscillations…
Various rod-shaped bacteria such as the canonical gram negative Escherichia coli or the well-studied gram positive Bacillus subtilis divide symmetrically after they approximately double their volume. Their size at division is not constant,…
The rate at which individual bacterial cells grow depends on the concentrations of cellular components such as ribosomes and proteins. These concentrations continuously fluctuate over time and are inherited from mother to daughter cells,…
Classic models of cell size control consider cells divide while reaching a threshold, e.g. size, age, or size extension. The molecular basis of the threshold involves multiple layers of regulation as well as gene noises. In this work, we…
Recent experiments have supported the Adder model for E. coli division control. This model posits that bacteria grow, on average, a fixed size before division. It also predicts decorrelation between the noise in the added size and the size…
Solving population balance equations, we derive analytical steady-state cell size distributions for single-lineage experiments, such as the mother machine. These experiments are fundamentally different from batch cultures where populations…
Establishing a quantitative connection between the population growth rate and the generation times of single cells is a prerequisite for understanding evolutionary dynamics of microbes. However, existing theories fail to account for the…