What happens to the cell size during microbial growth?

During microbial growth, the cell size increases as cells undergo processes of division and expansion. When microbes grow, they typically do so by absorbing nutrients from their environment, which leads to cellular expansion and an increase in biomass. This process involves synthesizing new cellular components, such as proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids, which all contribute to the increase in cell size.

As cells prepare to divide, they reach a certain point in their growth cycle where they have accumulated enough cellular material and have increased in size sufficiently to undergo binary fission, the most common method of reproduction in bacteria and many other microbes. When this division occurs, it does not revert the size of the individual cells back to the original size; rather, the newly formed daughter cells also take on the increased size, continuing the cycle of growth.

While various factors, such as nutrient availability and environmental conditions, might impact the growth rate and division frequency, the general trend is that microbial cells increase in size as they grow before they eventually divide, leading to an overall increase in cell size during this growth phase.