Cellular organization in lab-evolved and extant multicellular species obeys a maximum entropy law
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Authors
Day, Thomas C
Hoehn, Stephanie
Zamani-Dahaj, Seyed A
Yanni, David
Burnetti, Anthony
Pentz, Jennifer
Honerkamp-Smith, Aurelia R
Wioland, Hugo
Sleath, Hannah R
Ratcliff, William C
Yunker, Peter J
Publication Date
2022-02-21Journal Title
eLife
ISSN
2050-084X
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications Ltd
Volume
11
Language
eng
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Goldstein, R., Day, T. C., Hoehn, S., Zamani-Dahaj, S. A., Yanni, D., Burnetti, A., Pentz, J., et al. (2022). Cellular organization in lab-evolved and extant multicellular species obeys a maximum entropy law. eLife, 11 https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72707
Abstract
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.
Keywords
S. cerevisiae, Entropy, Volvox, Multicellularity, Physics Of Living Systems, Snowflake Yeast, Yeasts, Directed Molecular Evolution, Phylogeny, Cell Size
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/M017982/1)
Wellcome Trust (207510/Z/17/Z)
Identifiers
35188101, PMC8860445
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72707
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/335389
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