Living cells proliferate by completing and coordinating two essential cycles, a division cycle that controls cell size, and a DNA replication cycle that controls the number of chromosomal copies in the cell. Despite lacking dedicated cell cycle control regulators such as cyclins in eukaryotes, bacteria such as E. coli manage to tightly coordinate those two cycles across a wide range of growth conditions, including situations where multiple nested rounds of replication progress simultaneously. Various cell cycle models have been proposed to explain this feat, but it has been impossible to validate them so far due to a lack of experimental tools for systematically testing their different predictions. Recently new insights have been gained on the division cycle through the study of the structure of fluctuations in growth, size, and division in individual cells. In particular, it was found that cell size appears to be controlled by an adder mechanism, i.e. the added volume between divisions is held approximately constant and fluctuates independently of growth rate and cell size at birth. However, how replication initiation is regulated and coupled to cell size control remains unclear, mainly due to scarcity of experimental measurements on replication initiation at the single-cell level. Here, we used time-lapse microscopy in combination with microfluidics to directly measure growth, division and replication in thousands of single E. coli cells growing in both slow and fast growth conditions. In order to compare different phenomenological models of the cell cycle, we introduce a statistical framework which assess their ability to capture the correlation structure observed in the experimental data. Using this in combination with stochastic simulations, our data indicate that, instead of thinking of the cell cycle as running from birth to division, one should consider the chromosome replication cycle as central and in control of the cell cycle through two adder mechanisms: the added volume since the last initiation event controls the timing of both the next division event and the next replication initiation event. Interestingly the double-adder mechanism identified in this study has recently been found to explain the more complex cell cycle of mycobacteria, suggesting shared control strategies across species.

Initiation of chromosome replication controls both division and replication cycles in E. coli through a double-adder mechanism