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Resources » Paper

Farhadifar R et al. (2015) Curr Biol "Scaling, selection, and evolutionary dynamics of the mitotic spindle."

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  • Comments on Farhadifar R et al. (2015) Curr Biol "Scaling, selection, and evolutionary dynamics of the mitotic spindle." (0)

  • Overview

    PMID:
    25683802
    DOI:
    10.1016/j.cub.2014.12.060
    Status:
    Publication type:
    Journal_article
    WormBase ID:
    WBPaper00049919

    Farhadifar R, Baer CF, Valfort AC, Andersen EC, Muller-Reichert T, Delattre M, & Needleman DJ (2015). Scaling, selection, and evolutionary dynamics of the mitotic spindle. Curr Biol, 25, 732-40. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2014.12.060

    BACKGROUND: Cellular structures such as the nucleus, Golgi, centrioles, and spindle show remarkable diversity between species, but the mechanisms that produce these variations in cell biology are not known. RESULTS: Here we investigate the mechanisms that contribute to variations in morphology and dynamics of the mitotic spindle, which orchestrates chromosome segregation in all Eukaryotes and positions the division plane in many organisms. We use high-throughput imaging of the first division in nematodes to demonstrate that the measured effects of spontaneous mutations, combined with stabilizing selection on cell size, are sufficient to quantitatively explain both the levels of within-species variation in the spindle and its diversity over 100 million years of evolution. Furthermore, our finding of extensive within-species variation for the spindle demonstrates that there is not just one "wild-type" form, rather that cellular structures can exhibit a surprisingly broad diversity of naturally occurring behaviors. CONCLUSIONS: Our results argue that natural selection acts predominantly on cell size and indirectly influences the spindle through the scaling of the spindle with cell size. Previous studies have shown that the spindle also scales with cell size during early development. Thus, the scaling of the spindle with cell size controls its variation over both ontogeny and phylogeny.


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