Researchers finally solved the mystery behind what causes cells to split and divide.
How cells maintain their size and distribution has been a long-standing scientific conundrum, The University of California, San Diego reported. Gaining insight into this process could help researchers gain insight into the process of "runaway cells" that can lead to cancer.
To make their findings the researchers used a small device that allowed the to physically manipulate individual genetic materials.
"It turned out that we can use this device to also follow the life history of thousands of individual bacterial cells for hundreds of generations," said Suckjoon Jun, an assistant professor of physics and molecular biology at UC San Diego "We looked at the growth patterns of the cells very, very carefully, and realized that there is something really special about the way the cells control their size."
To monitor the growth and division of hundreds of thousands of two kinds of bacterial cells, E. coli and B. subtilis. They produced statistical samples in order to perform a quantitative analysis of the data.
The team determined cell growth followed the the growth law, which is an "essentially exponential growth based on a constant rate."
To the researchers' surprise they observed that the cells' size or their frequency of division had very little to do with when the cells divided. Instead the cells appeared to follow what the researchers called "an extraordinarily simple quantitative principle of cell-size control."
"Specifically, we showed that cells sense neither space nor time, but add constant size irrespective of their birth size," Jun said. "This 'adder' principle automatically ensures stability of size distributions."
"E. coli and B. subtilis are one billion years divergent in evolution, and they are the textbook examples of the diversity of molecular details for biological controls in different bacterial species. Thus, their sharing the same quantitative principle for size maintenance is a textbook level discovery," Jun concluded.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Current Biology.
