Open Access

Clotilde Cadart, Sylvain Monnier, Jacopo Grilli, Pablo J. Sáez, Nishit Srivastava, Rafaele Attia, Emmanuel Terriac, Buzz Baum, Marco Cosentino-Lagomarsino, Matthieu Piel

• Despite decades of research, how mammalian cell size is controlled remains unclear because of the difficulty of directly measuring growth at the single-cell level. Here we report direct measurements of single-cell volumes over entire cell cycles on various mammalian cell lines and primary human cells. We find that, in a majority of cell types, the volume added across the cell cycle shows little or no correlation to cell birth size, a homeostatic behavior called “adder”. This behavior involves modulation of G1 or S-G2 duration and modulation of growth rate. The precise combination of these mechanisms depends on the cell type and the growth condition. We have developed a mathematical framework to compare size homeostasis in datasets ranging from bacteria to mammalian cells. This reveals that a near-adder behavior is the most common type of size control and highlights the importance of growth rate modulation to size control in mammalian cells.