Cell-size control

Abstract

A fundamental and still mysterious question in cell biology is "How do cells know how big they are?". The fact that they do is evident from the strict maintenance of size homeostasis within populations of cells and has been verified by a variety of creative experiments over the past 100 years. An increasingly sophisticated understanding of cell-cycle-control mechanisms and innovations in cell imaging and analysis tools have allowed recent progress in proposing and testing models of cell-size control. Nonetheless, a biochemical understanding of how proposed cell-size mechanisms might work is only beginning to be developed. This primer introduces the field of cell-size control and discusses some of the questions that are yet to be answered.