One of the central questions in biology is how a cell specifies its size. Because size distribution often shows a characteristically skewed pattern in a tissue, there may be some stochastic option for determining cell size. However, the underlying mechanism by which the target distribution is established by organizing a cellular coin-toss remains elusive. Associate Professor Kensuke Kawade at Okazaki Institute for Integrative Bioscience and National Institute for Basic Biology, in collaboration with Professor Hirokazu Tsukaya at the Graduate School of Science, the University of Tokyo, discovered that endoreduplication, which promotes cellular enlargement in the epidermal tissue of Arabidopsis thaliana, occurs randomly as a Poisson process throughout cellular maturation.

Epidermal pavement and palisade mesophyll cells in a leaf of Arabidopsis thaliana

Dice game for endoreduplication of the leaf epidermal cell