New homeostatic principles in biology - how cells go back to their normal size without feedback*

Bacterial physiology is a branch of biology that aims to understand overarching principles of cellular reproduction. Many important issues in bacterial physiology are inherently quantitative, and the field is currently enjoying its second Renaissance due to physicists. In this talk, I will focus on cell-size control and homeostasis, a fundmental problem that has been rapidly transforming just in the past few years. I will introduce some of the long-standing questions, and explain the answers that experimentalists and theorists have provided so far. Collectively, the emerging picture is likely to answer a general class of problmes in biology beyond bacteria, i.e., how individual cells can converge to their average state without invoking any apparent feedback mechanisms.