Noise in Exponential Growth

The interplay between growth and division of cells is has been studied in the context of exponential growth of bacterial cells (in suitable conditions) for decades. However, bulk culture studies obscure phenomena that manifest in single cells over many generations. We introduce a unique technology combining microfluidics, single-cell imaging, and quantitative analysis. This enables us to track the growth of single Caulobacter crescentus stalked cells over hundreds of generations. The statistics that we extract indicate a size thresholding mechanism for cell division and a non-trivial scaling collapse of division time distributions at different temperatures. In this talk I shall discuss these observations and a stochastic model of growth and division that captures all our observations with no free parameters.