Building the cell from unreliable parts with Shankar Mukherji

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, size, and composition 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, quantitative fluorescence imaging, and quantum sensing 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 maintain compositional control and even appear to collectively organize organelle biogenesis into specific “modes” to achieve homeostasis in cell size and growth rate.

This lecture was made possible by the William C. Ferguson Fund