ArticleScientific reports2016
A mechanistic stochastic framework for regulating bacterial cell division.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed.
- Impact of variability in cell generation times on cell-to-cell variability of protein concentrations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Inferring bacterial cell size dynamics across media conditions.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Coupling Bacterial Cell Size Regulation with Clonal Proliferation Dynamics Reveals Cell Division Based on Surface Area.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Cyclo-stationary distributions of mRNA and Protein counts for random cell division times.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The rheology and interfacial properties of biomolecular condensates.Biophysical reviews · 2025Review
- A generalized adder for cell size homeostasis: Effects on stochastic clonal proliferation.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- Sequestration of gene products by decoys enhances precision in the timing of intracellular events.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Bacterial cell size modulation along the growth curve across nutrient conditions.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- A GeneralizedbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Cell identity revealed by precise cell cycle state mapping links data modalities.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Mechanisms of cell size regulation in slow-growing Escherichia coli cells: discriminating models beyond the adder.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- Feedback between stochastic gene networks and population dynamics enables cellular decision-making.Science advances · 2024Article
- Energy allocation theory for bacterial growth control in and out of steady state.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- A Moments-Based Analytical Approach for Cell Size Homeostasis.IEEE control systems letters · 2024Article
- PyEcoLib: a python library for simulating stochastic cell size dynamics.Physical biology · 2023Article
- Dynamic proteome trade-offs regulate bacterial cell size and growth in fluctuating nutrient environments.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Beyond the average: An updated framework for understanding the relationship between cell growth, DNA replication, and division in a bacterial system.PLoS genetics · 2023Article
- Cellular resource allocation strategies for cell size and shape control in bacteria.The FEBS journal · 2022Review
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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 add a fixed size (volume) from birth to division, irrespective of their size at birth. To mechanistically explain the adder principle, we consider a timekeeper protein that begins to get stochastically expressed after cell birth at a rate proportional to the volume. Cell-division time is formulated as the first-passage time for protein copy numbers to hit a fixed threshold. Consistent with data, the model predicts that the noise in division timing increases with size at birth. Intriguingly, our results show that the distribution of the volume added between successive cell-division events is independent of the newborn cell size. This was dramatically seen in experimental studies, where histograms of the added volume corresponding to different newborn sizes collapsed on top of each other. The model provides further insights consistent with experimental observations: the distribution of the added volume when scaled by its mean becomes invariant of the growth rate. In summary, our simple yet elegant model explains key experimental findings and suggests a mechanism for regulating both the mean and fluctuations in cell-division timing for controlling size.
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