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Scaling, selection, and evolutionary dynamics of the mitotic spindle.
Curr Biol, 25(6):732-40.
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 levelsof within-species variation in the spindle and its diversity over approximately 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 arguethat natural selection acts predominantly on cell size and indirectly influencesthe 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 bothontogeny and phylogeny.
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