Abstract Cell size is believed to influence cell growth and metabolism. Consistently, several studies have revealed that large cells have lower mass accumulation rates per unit mass (i.e. growth efficiency) than intermediate sized cells in the same population. Size-dependent growth is commonly attributed to transport limitations, such as increased diffusion timescales and decreased surface-to-volume ratio. However, separating cell size and cell cycle dependent growth is challenging. To decouple and quantify cell size and cell cycle dependent growth effects we monitor growth efficiency of freely proliferating and cycling polyploid mouse lymphocytes with high resolution. To achieve this, we develop large-channel suspended microchannel resonators that allow us to monitor mass of single cells ranging from 40 pg (small diploid lymphocyte) to over 4000 pg, with a resolution ranging from ~1% to ~0.05%. We find that mass increases exponentially with respect to time in early cell cycle but transitions to linear dependence during late S and G2 stages. This growth behavior repeats with every endomitotic cycle as cells grow in to polyploidy. Overall, growth efficiency changes 29% due to cell cycle. In contrast, growth efficiency did not change due to cell size over a 100-fold increase in cell mass during polyploidization. Consistently, growth efficiency remained constant when cell cycle was arrested in G2. Thus, cell cycle is a primary determinant of growth efficiency and increasing cell size does not impose transport limitations that decrease growth efficiency in cultured mammalian cells. Significance statement Cell size is believed to influence cell behavior through limited transport efficiency in larger cells, which could decrease the growth rate of large cells. However, this has not been experimentally investigated due to a lack of non-invasive, high-precision growth quantification methods suitable for measuring large cells. Here, we have engineered large versions of microfluidic mass sensors called suspended microchannel resonators in order to study the growth of single mammalian cells that range 100-fold in mass. This revealed that the absolute size of a cell does not impose strict transport or other limitations that would inhibit growth. In contrast to cell size, however, cell cycle has a relatively large influence on growth and our measurements allow us to decouple and quantify the growth effects caused by cell cycle and cell size.

Mass measurements of polyploid lymphocytes reveal that growth is not size limited but depends strongly on cell cycle