Evolutionary advantage of cell size control

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the adder cell size control strategy offers a general evolutionary advantage in growing populations facing mortality constraints, due to its heritability and ability to adapt to mortality landscapes.

Contribution

It reveals the evolutionary benefit of the adder strategy under mortality constraints and explains its advantage through heritability and adaptive selection mechanisms.

Findings

Adder control strategy is advantageous under growth-dependent mortality.

Heritability of cell size enables selection to optimize size distribution.

The advantage persists across various size-dependent mortality landscapes.

Abstract

We analyze the advantage of cell size control strategies in growing populations under mortality constraints. We demonstrate a general advantage of the adder control strategy in the presence of growth-dependent mortality, and for different size-dependent mortality landscapes. Its advantage stems from epigenetic heritability of cell size, which enables selection to act on the distribution of cell sizes in a population to avoid mortality thresholds and adapt to a mortality landscape.