Branching resource allocation processes for the analysis and inference of phenotypic growth variability

Bacterial growth laws have been formulated that relate growth rate to the macromolecular composition of the cell, reflecting cellular resource allocation. These results, however, do not consider variability across an isogenic population. New experimental technologies have been developed to monitor growth and gene expression at the single-cell level, opening the path to the exploration of the origins of variability in growth phenotypes. In this talk, we present a multi-scale model relating single-cell resource allocation with growth variability. The first level consists of molecular processes taking place in individual cells, while the second level accounts for the growth of the cellular population, via cellular division. Using a calibration based on literature, we compare our estimation of variability with single-cell data, and explore the origin of this variability. This is ongoing work in collaboration with Eugenio Cinquemani, Hidde de Jong and Lena Kuwata.