Details Matter: noise and model structure set the relationship between cell size and cell cycle timing

TL;DR

This study compares molecular models of cell size regulation in bacteria and budding yeast, revealing how noise and structure influence size control and division timing, with implications for understanding cell cycle regulation.

Contribution

It demonstrates how noise impacts size regulation models, showing the robustness of initiator accumulation in bacteria and the weak control in budding yeast.

Findings

In budding cells, delaying division increases size variability.

In bacteria, initiator accumulation model provides robust size control under noise.

Division into equal cells does not increase size distribution in bacteria.

Abstract

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 accumulation. We apply the models to two settings: bacteria like Escherichia coli, that grow fully before they set a division plane and divide into two equally sized cells, and cells that form a bud early in the cell division cycle, confine new growth to that bud, and divide at the connection between that bud and the mother cell, like the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In budding cells, delaying cell division until buds reach the same size as their mother leads to very weak size control, with average cell size and standard deviation of cell size increasing over time and saturating up to 100-fold higher than those values for cells that divide when the bud is still substantially smaller than its mother. In budding yeast, both inhibitor dilution or initiator accumulation models are consistent with the observation that the daughters of diploid cells add a constant volume before they divide. This adder behavior has also been observed in bacteria. We find that in bacteria an inhibitor dilution model produces adder correlations that are not robust to noise in the timing of DNA replication initiation or in the timing from initiation of DNA replication to cell division (the C + D period). In contrast, in bacteria an initiator accumulation model yields robust adder correlations in the regime where noise in the timing of DNA replication initiation is much greater than noise in the C + D period, as reported previously [1]. In bacteria, division into two equally sized cells does not broaden the size distribution.