Recent advances in single-cell technologies have enabled time-resolved measurements of
the cell size over several cell cycles. These data encode information on how cells correct
size aberrations so that they do not grow abnormally large or small. Here, we formulate a
piecewise deterministic Markov model describing the evolution of the cell size over many
generations, for all three cell size homeostasis strategies (timer, sizer, and adder). The
model is solved to obtain an analytical expression for the non-Gaussian cell size distribution …