Growing from a few cells: combined effects of initial stochasticity and cell-to-cell variability
Résumé
The growth of a cell population appears deterministic, although the division process is stochastic at the single-cell level. Microfluidic observations however display wide variations in the growth of small populations. Here we combine theory, simulations, and experiments to explore the link between singlecell stochasticity and the growth of a population starting from a small number of individuals. The study yields descriptors of the probability distribution function (PDF) of the population size under three sources of stochasticity: cell-to-cell variability, uncertainty in the number of initial cells, and generation dependent division times.. Thus probabilistic predictions of the growth of bacterial populations can be obtained with implications for both naturally occurring conditions and technological applications of single-cell microfluidics.