Unlike many single-celled organisms, the growth of fission yeast cells within a cell cycle is not exponential. It is rather characterized by three distinct phases (elongation, septation and fission), each with a different growth rate. Experiments also show that the distribution of cell size in a lineage is often bimodal, unlike the unimodal distributions measured for the bacterium Escherichia coli. Here we construct a detailed stochastic model of cell size dynamics in fission yeast. The theory leads to analytic expressions for the cell size and the birth size distributions, and explains the origin of bimodality seen in experiments. In particular our theory shows that the left peak in the bimodal distribution is associated with cells in the elongation phase while the right peak is due to cells in the septation and fission phases. We show that the size control strategy, the variability in the added size during a cell cycle and the fraction of time spent in each of the three cell growth phases have a strong bearing on the shape of the cell size distribution. Furthermore we infer all the parameters of our model by matching the theoretical cell size and birth size distributions to those from experimental single cell time-course data for seven different growth conditions. Our method provides a much more accurate means of determining the cell size control strategy (timer, adder or sizer) than the standard method based on the slope of the best linear fit between the birth and division sizes. We also show that the variability in added size and the strength of cell size control of fission yeast depend weakly on the temperature but strongly on the culture medium.
Metabolic pathways further increase the complexity of cell size control in budding yeast