In nature, microorganisms exhibit different volumes spanning six orders of magnitude ¹ . Despite their capability to create different sizes, a clonal population in a given environment maintains a uniform size across individual cells. Recent studies in eukaryotic and bacterial organisms showed that this homogeneity in cell size can be accomplished by growing a constant size between two cell cycle events (that is, the adder model ^2-6 ). Demonstration of the adder model led to the hypothesis that this phenomenon is a consequence of convergent evolution. Given that archaeal cells share characteristics with both bacteria and eukaryotes, we investigated whether and how archaeal cells exhibit control over cell size. To this end, we developed a soft-lithography method of growing the archaeal cells to enable quantitative time-lapse imaging and single-cell analysis, which would be useful for other microorganisms. Using this method, we demonstrated that Halobacterium salinarum, a hypersaline-adapted archaeal organism, grows exponentially at the single-cell level and maintains a narrow-size distribution by adding a constant length between cell division events. Interestingly, the archaeal cells exhibited greater variability in cell division placement and exponential growth rate across individual cells in a population relative to those observed in Escherichia coli ^6-9 . Here, we present a theoretical framework that explains how these larger fluctuations in archaeal cell cycle events contribute to cell size variability and control.

中文翻译：

---

尽管生长和分裂噪音较大，但古细菌细胞与细菌共享共同的大小控制。

在自然界中，微生物表现出跨越六个数量级^{1 的}不同体积。尽管它们能够产生不同的大小，但在给定环境中的克隆种群在单个细胞中保持统一的大小。最近对真核生物和细菌生物的研究表明，细胞大小的这种同质性可以通过在两个细胞周期事件之间生长恒定大小来实现（即加法器模型^2-6）。加法器模型的证明导致了这种现象是收敛进化的结果的假设。鉴于古细菌细胞与细菌和真核生物具有共同特征，我们研究了古细菌细胞是否以及如何控制细胞大小。为此，我们开发了一种生长古细菌细胞的软光刻方法，以实现定量延时成像和单细胞分析，这对其他微生物很有用。使用这种方法，我们证明了盐酸盐盐杆菌，一种适应高盐度的古细菌，在单细胞水平上呈指数增长，并通过在细胞分裂事件之间添加恒定长度来保持窄大小分布。有趣的是，^6-9。在这里，我们提出了一个理论框架，解释了古细菌细胞周期事件中这些较大的波动如何影响细胞大小的可变性和控制。