Cellular organization in lab-evolved and extant multicellular species obeys a maximum entropy lawShow others and affiliations
2022 (English)In: eLIFE, E-ISSN 2050-084X, Vol. 11, article id e72707
Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
The prevalence of multicellular organisms is due in part to their ability to form complex structures. How cells pack in these structures is a fundamental biophysical issue, underlying their functional properties. However, much remains unknown about how cell packing geometries arise, and how they are affected by random noise during growth - especially absent developmental programs. Here, we quantify the statistics of cellular neighborhoods of two different multicellular eukaryotes: lab-evolved 'snowflake' yeast and the green alga Volvox carteri. We find that despite large differences in cellular organization, the free space associated with individual cells in both organisms closely fits a modified gamma distribution, consistent with maximum entropy predictions originally developed for granular materials. This 'entropic' cellular packing ensures a degree of predictability despite noise, facilitating parent-offspring fidelity even in the absence of developmental regulation. Together with simulations of diverse growth morphologies, these results suggest that gamma-distributed cell neighborhood sizes are a general feature of multicellularity, arising from conserved statistics of cellular packing.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
eLife Sciences Publications , 2022. Vol. 11, article id e72707
Keywords [en]
entropy, multicellularity, physics of living systems, S. cerevisiae, Snowflake yeast, Volvox
National Category
Biochemistry Molecular Biology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-192878DOI: 10.7554/eLife.72707ISI: 000760774200001PubMedID: 35188101Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85125005121OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-192878DiVA, id: diva2:1643097
2022-03-082022-03-082025-02-20Bibliographically approved