Cell size regulation induces sustained oscillations in the population growth rate

Abstract

We study the effect of correlations in generation times on the dynamics of population growth of microorganisms. We show that any non-zero correlation that is due to cell-size regulation, no matter how small, induces long-term oscillations in the population growth rate. The population only reaches its steady state when we include the often-neglected variability in the growth rates of individual cells. We discover that the relaxation time scale of the population to its steady state is determined by the distribution of single-cell growth rates and is surprisingly independent of details of the division process such as the noise in the timing of division and the mechanism of cell-size regulation. We validate the predictions of our model using existing experimental data and propose an experimental method to measure single-cell growth variability by observing how long it takes for the population to reach its steady state or balanced growth.

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• Non-genetic variability: survival strategy or nuisance?
• Signal in the noise: temporal variation in exponentially growing populations
• Master equation approach to the stochastic accumulation dynamics of bacterial cell cycle
• Cell cycle length and long-time behaviour of an age-size model
• Asymptotic decoupling of population growth rate and cell size distribution
• Competition between transient oscillations and early stochasticity in exponentially growing populations
• Exactly Solvable Population Model with Square-Root Growth Noise and Cell-Size Regulation