Hosted by Edda Klipp (HU)
Prof. Suckjoon Jun
University of California San Diego - Department of Physics
Suckjoon Jun is Professor of Physics at the University of California San Diego and leads a multidisciplinary research group that explores one of biology’s most fundamental questions: how one cell becomes two. His lab combines physics, engineering, and biology to uncover the quantitative principles that govern cellular life.
Driven by curiosity rather than methods, Suckjoon Jun's team develops new tools when existing ones fall short - most notably the microfluidic mother machine, which has transformed single-cell physiology studies. Among their key conceptual advances is the discovery of the adder principle in cell-size control, a central concept in understanding how cells maintain size homeostasis. Today, the Jun Lab continues to push the boundaries of quantitative microbial physiology, investigating how cells allocate resources and achieve precision control across the three domains of life.
In his talk 'On balanced growth and precision control' Suckjoon Jun talked about the two core principles that underlie bacterial physiology. The first, articulated in the 1950s, is balanced growth - the idea that all cellular components increase at the same rate. The second is precision control -- the cell’s ability to coordinate spatial and temporal events, such as DNA replication and division, with remarkable accuracy. Reconciling these two principles poses a conceptual challenge rarely addressed in biology textbooks. During his talk he showed how bacteria achieve physiological homeostasis and precise regulation under balanced growth, revealing mechanisms fundamentally different from those emphasized in eukaryote-centric models.
