A Stochastic Model of Size Control in the Budding Yeast Cell Cycle

Cell size is a key characteristic that significantly affects many aspects of cellular physiology. There are specific control mechanisms during cell cycle to maintain the cell size within a range from one generation to another. Such control mechanisms introduce substantial variability to important properties of the cell cycle such as inter-division time. To quantitatively study the effect of such variability in progression through cell cycle, detailed stochastic models are required. In this paper, a new hybrid stochastic model is proposed to study the effect of molecular noise and size control mechanism on the variabilities in cell cycle of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The proposed model provides an accurate, yet computationally efficient approach for simulation of an intricate system by integrating the deterministic and stochastic simulation schemes.