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Scaling of Cell Growth and Macromolecules

Quantitative Understanding of Cellular Size- and Time-Scales

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Abstract

Biological systems span a wide spectrum of scales; size scales ranging from atomic to planetary and time scales from femtoseconds to billions of years. Scaling analysis has been a powerful tool to relate size scales and time scales and has revealed allometric relations between dynamics and sizes across diverse biological organisms, providing a potentially unifying framework. J. T. Bonner has demonstrated a natural scaling of size-scales with time-scales across organisms and showed that they are directly related in his now classic work Why Size Matters.

In this article, we focus on cells, the fundamental unit of life that can be unambiguously identified as being ‘alive’. We highlight the size scales of cells from submicron prokaryotes to single cells visible to the naked eye and compare these scales to those of the molecular building blocks of biology, namely, the macromolecules of DNA, RNA, lipids, and proteins. We then examine the scaling of these sizes with the reported times of cell growth, along with molecular replication and turnover. We find that the scaling over such a wide range of molecular and cellular processes matches the classical scaling seen by Bonner across organisms. In conclusion, this scaling relationship points to the need for a more detailed biophysical understanding of how molecular networks govern cellular processes.

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Acknowledgement

Tanvi Kale is supported by a Doctoral Fellowship from IISER Pune. Shivam S. Chitnis is supported by an INSPIRE fellowship from DST. This article was part of a classroom assignment by Tanvi Kale and Shivam S. Chitnis in a cellular biophysics course taught by Chaitanya A. Athale. Fun classroom discussions with past students and the freedom to design the course offered by USER Pune are acknowledged by Chaitanya A. Athale.

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  1. IISER Pune, Dr. Homi Bhabha Road, Pune, 411 008, India

    Chaitanya A. Athale

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  1. Tanvi Kale
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  2. Shivam S. Chitnis
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  3. Chaitanya A. Athale
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Correspondence to Chaitanya A. Athale.

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Tanvi Kale obtained a Masters degree in Bioinformatics and Biotechnology from IBAB Bangalore in 2020. She is pursuing PhD at IISER Pune in synthetic biology.

Shivam Chitnis is a 4th year BS-MS student at IISER Pune. He is currently interested in understanding the neurobiology of birdsong.

Dr Chaitanya Athale is an Associate Professor in the Division of Biology at IISER Pune. He works in cellular biophysics and has been teaching a course by the same name since 2010.

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Kale, T., Chitnis, S.S. & Athale, C.A. Scaling of Cell Growth and Macromolecules. Reson 27, 325–337 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-022-1324-3

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