Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 28: Systems Biology & Gene Expression and Signalling

BP 28.1: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 8, 2016, 09:30–10:00, H44

The biosynthetic basis of budding yeast cell size control — •Kurt M. Schmoller, Jonathan J Turner, Mardo Koivomägi, Devon Chandler-Brown, and Jan M. Skotheim — Stanford University, Stanford, US

Cell size is an important physiological trait that sets the scale of all biosynthetic processes. Although physiological studies have revealed that cells actively regulate their size, the molecular mechanisms underlying this regulation have remained unclear. Using quantitative single cell microscopy, we identified the molecular mechanism coupling growth and division in budding yeast. As cells grow, they dilute a cell cycle inhibitor while keeping the upstream activator at a constant concentration, which results in a continuously increasing probability for cell cycle entry. Size control itself is ensured by a differential dependence of activator and inhibitor synthesis rates on cell size. We anticipate that such differential size dependence of protein synthesis may be a universal mechanism for cells to coordinate their proteome with cell size.