Population-level properties from single-cell statistics

Thanks to recent advances in single-cell technology, models of bacterial growth, division, and cell-size regulation have become more accurate and more complex. The complexity in these models creates a challenge in understanding what aspects of single-cell statistics affect what properties of the populations. In this talk, I will show that under mild and sensible assumptions, models of growth and division have independent effects on the population dynamics: models of single-cell growth determine the population growth rate independent of the details of cell division, and models of division and cell-size regulation determine the population cell-size distribution independent of details of cellular growth.