SKM 2023 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 16: Systems Biophysics

BP 16.2: Talk

Wednesday, March 29, 2023, 11:45–12:00, BAR 0106

Cell size distribution: an analytical comparison between lineage and population experiments — •Arthur Genthon — ESPCI, Université PSL, Paris, France (until december 2022) — Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany (from january 2023)

In the past decade, new microfluidic devices, like the mother machine, have been designed to monitor single lineages of cells for many generations with great precision. In classical bulk cultures where full populations are grown, cells with high reproductive success lead to larger populations of offsprings, while no such selection effect is present in single-lineage experiments. Quantifying the statistical bias between these two families of experiments is at the basis of a universal notion of natural selection, which can be defined for any branching tree, not just in cell biology. In this work, we thus compute analytical lineage-population biases for the cell size distribution, in the context of size-controlled cells. The role of stochasticity, both in single-cell growth and in volume partitioning at division, is explored, and we show how it can cancel the lineage-population bias. In addition, in simple cases we show how we can learn the laws of cell growth and division from mother machine steady state size distributions. The parameters of the model, such as the single-cell growth rate, the strength of the size control or the asymmetry of division are obtained by fitting analytical distributions to Escherichia coli data.