PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Clotilde Cadart AU - Sylvain Monnier AU - Jacopo Grilli AU - Rafaele Attia AU - Emmanuel Terriac AU - Buzz Baum AU - Marco Cosentino-Lagomarsino AU - Matthieu Piel TI - An adder behavior in mammalian cells achieves size control by modulation of growth rate and cell cycle duration AID - 10.1101/152728 DP - 2017 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 152728 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/20/152728.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/20/152728.full AB - Despite decades of research, it remains unclear how mammalian cell growth varies with cell size and across the cell division cycle to maintain size control. Answers to this question have been limited by the difficulty of directly measuring growth at the single cell level. Here, using a variety of cultured mammalian cell lines, we report direct measurement of single cell volumes over a complete cell division cycle. We show that the volume added across the cell cycle is independent of cell birth size, a size homeostasis behavior called “adder”. We propose a mathematical framework that can be used to characterize the full spectrum of size homeostasis mechanisms from bacteria to mammalian cells. This reveals that a near-adder is the most common type of size regulation, but shows that it can arise from various types of coupling between cell size, cell growth rate and cell cycle progression.