How does cell size regulation affect population growth?

The proliferation of a growing microbial colony is well characterized by the population growth rate. However, at the single-cell level, isogenic cells often exhibit different cell-cycle durations. For evolutionary dynamics, it is thus important to establish the connection between the population growth rate and the heterogeneous single-cell generation time. Existing theories often make the assumption that the generation times of mother and daughter cells are independent. However, it has been shown that to maintain a bounded cell size distribution, cells that grow exponentially at the single-cell level need to adopt cell size regulation, leading to a negative correlation of motherdaughter generation time. In this work, we construct a general framework to describe the population growth in the presence of size regulation. We derive a formula for the population growth rate, which only depends on the variability of single-cell growth rate, independent of other sources of noises. Our work shows that a population can enhance the population growth by reducing the growth rate variability, which may be the reason for the mild growth rate variability observed in many microorganisms.