01/04/2025
How Cells Control Their Size and Impact Population Growth
Recent studies examining how cells change size over time have uncovered fascinating patterns across many different organisms. One key discovery is the "adder" principle, where cells add a consistent amount of size between birth and division, regardless of how big they were at birth.
Our research provides a deeper understanding of this adder mechanism, showing it works with any pattern of cell growth—not just the commonly assumed exponential growth. The main requirement is surprisingly simple: the molecules that trigger cell division must be produced at a rate that matches the cell's growth rate, accumulating until they reach a specific threshold that signals division.
This discovery has important implications for how groups of cells derived from a single ancestor (clones) grow over time. When cells grow exponentially with the adder mechanism, initial differences between clonal populations eventually disappear—clone sizes become more uniform over time. However, with several non-exponential growth patterns, these differences between clones actually increase over time and stabilize at a higher level of variation.
These findings help explain the connection between how individual cells regulate their size and how entire populations of related cells grow. This provides insight into why we see such wide variations in clone sizes in labeled human cell lines used in research.
I am so happy to share with you guys my most recent article in Biophysical Journal! I have been working for almost ten years culminating with a project like this! It explores a simple model explaining how cell division is related to colony expansion. Check it out https://lnkd.in/eeHxWfhZ
