BPS2026 – Building the cell from unreliable parts: Coordinating stochastic organelle biogenesis with cellular growth

Perhaps the defining feature of the eukaryotic cell is its organization into membrane-bound compartments known as organelles. While the processes underlying the biogenesis of individual organelles are often well-known, the precision with which individual cells exert quantitative control over individual organelle properties, such as number and size, and coordinate these properties at systems-scale across the cell’s many different types of organelles remain frontier problems in cell biology and biophysics. Using a combination of theory and quantitative fluorescence imaging, I will describe our recent efforts to show that cells exhibit substantial limits to the precision with which they can control organelle numbers and sizes but despite this, appear to collectively organize organelle biogenesis into specific “modes” to achieve homeostasis in cell size and growth rate.