Analysis and Modeling of Growing Budding Yeast Populations at the Single Cell Level

Model organisms and in particular the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae have been instrumental in advancing our understanding of cell cycle progression. The asymmetric division of the budding yeast and the tight coupling between cell growth and division have challenged the theoretical understanding of the cell size structure of growing yeast populations. Past efforts have centered on modeling the steady-state theoretical age distribution for asymmetric division from which a cell size distribution can be derived assuming dispersion of cell size within each age class. Different developments, especially in the field of flow cytometry, allowed the determination of a number of cellular properties and their joint distributions for the entire population and the different subpopulations as well. A new rigorous framework for modeling directly the dynamics of size distributions of structured yeast populations has been proposed, which readily extends to modeling of more complex conditions, such as transient growth. Literature on the structure of growing yeast populations and modeling of cell cycle progression is reviewed. (C) 2008 international Society for Advancement of Cytometry