Extreme Value Statistics and Length Control of Filaments in Cells

Explore how cells control the size of their organelles through a conference talk examining extreme value statistics and filament length regulation in cellular biology. Discover the limiting pool mechanism that successfully explains size control in nucleoli, centrosomes, and spindles, while investigating why this mechanism fails to account for filaments whose length matches cell dimensions. Learn about experimental research on actin cables in yeast cells and the theoretical framework addressing how cells assemble filaments to specified lengths. Examine a stochastic model of cable assembly that produces a Gumbel distribution of cable lengths, consistent with experimental observations. Analyze published data on length fluctuations of filamentous structures across various cell types, revealing universal features predicted by extreme value statistics. Understand how these findings contribute to a broader geometrical theory of assembly control in cells that operates independently of specific biochemical reactions, offering new insights into fundamental mechanisms of cellular organization and size regulation.