Cell Growth and Size Homeostasis in Proliferating Animal Cells

A long-standing question in biology is whether there is an intrinsic mechanism for coordinating growth and the cell cycle in metazoan cells. We examined cell size distributions in populations of lymphoblasts and applied a mathematical analysis to calculate how growth rates vary with both cell size and the cell cycle. Our results show that growth rate is size-dependent throughout the cell cycle. After initial growth suppression, there is a rapid increase in growth rate during the G(1) phase, followed by a period of constant exponential growth. The probability of cell division varies independently with cell size and cell age. We conclude that proliferating mammalian cells have an intrinsic mechanism that maintains cell size.