Coupling of growth rate and developmental tempo reduces body size heterogeneity in C. elegans

Klement Stojanovski, Helge Großhans () and Benjamin D. Towbin ()
Additional contact information
Klement Stojanovski: University of Bern
Helge Großhans: Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI)
Benjamin D. Towbin: University of Bern

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: Abstract Animals increase by orders of magnitude in volume during development. Therefore, small variations in growth rates among individuals could amplify to a large heterogeneity in size. By live imaging of C. elegans, we show that amplification of size heterogeneity is prevented by an inverse coupling of the volume growth rate to the duration of larval stages and does not involve strict size thresholds for larval moulting. We perturb this coupling by changing the developmental tempo through manipulation of a transcriptional oscillator that controls the duration of larval development. As predicted by a mathematical model, this perturbation alters the body volume. Model analysis shows that an inverse relation between the period length and the growth rate is an intrinsic property of genetic oscillators and can occur independently of additional complex regulation. This property of genetic oscillators suggests a parsimonious mechanism that counteracts the amplification of size differences among individuals during development.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29720-8 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-29720-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29720-8

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().