title: Sizing up to divide: mitotic cell-size control in fission yeast.
abstract: Schizosaccharomyces pombe is a good model to study cell-size control. These cells integrate size information into cell cycle controls at both the G1/S and G2/M transitions, although the primary control operates at the entry into mitosis. At G2/M there is both a size threshold, demonstrated by the fact that cells divide when they reach 14 μm in length, and also correction around this threshold, evident from the narrow distribution of sizes within a population. This latter property is referred to as size homeostasis. It has been argued that a population of cells accumulating mass in a linear fashion will have size homeostasis in the absence of size control, if cycle time is controlled by a fixed timer. Because fission yeast cells do not grow in a simple linear fashion, they require a size-sensing mechanism. However, current models do not fully describe all aspects of this control, especially the coordination of cell size with ploidy.
authors.affiliation: Cell Cycle Laboratory, The Francis Crick Institute, London WC2A 3LY, United Kingdom; email: elizabeth.wood@cantab.net.
authors.forename: Elizabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Wood
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Nurse
mesh_terms: D002453:Cell Cycle / Q000502:physiology; D018797:Cell Cycle Proteins / Q000378:metabolism; D048429:Cell Size; D006706:Homeostasis / Q000502:physiology; D008938:Mitosis / Q000502:physiology*; D012568:Schizosaccharomyces / Q000378:metabolism / Q000502:physiology*
chemical_list: D018797:Cell Cycle Proteins
keywords: Pom1; Schizosaccharomyces pombe; cell-size variability; ploidy; size homeostasis