Figure 1.

Cell cycle and phase time distributions and synchronized oscillations. (a) shows a comparison between the distribution of the duration of the G1 phase obtained by tracking 200 randomly chosen cells (red histogram) and the Erlang distribution with the same mean and variance (black curve). (b) shows the comparison between the distribution of the full cell cycle time of the same tracked cells (blue histogram) together with the corresponding Erlang distribution. (c) shows one time series trajectory of the proportion of G1 cells, Q, obtained from the experiments (blue line), together with the envelope of two SDs from the mean (light gray region) predicted using the multi-stage model. The parameters of the multi-stage models are obtained by fitting the distribution of the total cell cycle time and G1 duration (see Supporting materials and methods, section S4): K = 92, αK = 33, β = 4.96 h⁻¹, v = 94.3, and N₀ =381. To see this figure in color, go online.