Publications

In most animals, the oocyte is the largest cell by volume. The oocyte undergoes a period of large-scale growth during its development, prior to fertilization. At first glance, tissues that support the development of the oocyte in different organisms have diverse cellular characteristics that would seem to prohibit functional comparisons. However, these tissues often act with a common goal of establishing dynamic forms of two-way communication with the oocyte. We propose that this bidirectional communication between oocytes and support cells is a universal phenomenon that can be directly compared across species. Specifically, we highlight fruit fly and mouse oogenesis to demonstrate that similarities and differences in these systems should be used to inform and design future experiments in both models.

Failure to reorganize the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) in mitosis results in chromosome missegregation. Here, we show that accurate chromosome segregation in human cells requires cell cycle-regulated ER membrane production. Excess ER membranes increase the viscosity of the mitotic cytoplasm to physically restrict chromosome movements, which impedes the correction of mitotic errors leading to the formation of micronuclei. Mechanistically, we demonstrate that the protein phosphatase CTDNEP1 counteracts mTOR kinase to establish a dephosphorylated pool of the phosphatidic acid phosphatase lipin 1 in interphase. CTDNEP1 control of lipin 1 limits the synthesis of fatty acids for ER membrane biogenesis in interphase that then protects against chromosome missegregation in mitosis. Thus, regulation of ER size can dictate the biophysical properties of mitotic cells, providing an explanation for why ER reorganization is necessary for mitotic fidelity. Our data further suggest that dysregulated lipid metabolism is a potential source of aneuploidy in cancer cells.

Mitochondrial metabolism is of central importance to diverse aspects of cell and developmental biology. Defects in mitochondria are associated with many diseases, including cancer, neuropathology, and infertility. Our understanding of mitochondrial metabolism in situ and dysfunction in diseases are limited by the lack of techniques to measure mitochondrial metabolic fluxes with sufficient spatiotemporal resolution. Herein, we developed a new method to infer mitochondrial metabolic fluxes in living cells with subcellular resolution from fluorescence lifetime imaging of NADH. This result is based on the use of a generic coarse-grained NADH redox model. We tested the model in mouse oocytes and human tissue culture cells subject to a wide variety of perturbations by comparing predicted fluxes through the electron transport chain (ETC) to direct measurements of oxygen consumption rate. Interpreting the fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy measurements of NADH using this model, we discovered a homeostasis of ETC flux in mouse oocytes: perturbations of nutrient supply and energy demand of the cell do not change ETC flux despite significantly impacting NADH metabolic state. Furthermore, we observed a subcellular spatial gradient of ETC flux in mouse oocytes and found that this gradient is primarily a result of a spatially heterogeneous mitochondrial proton leak. We concluded from these observations that ETC flux in mouse oocytes is not controlled by energy demand or supply, but by the intrinsic rates of mitochondrial respiration.

DNA damage reshapes the cellular transcriptome by modulating RNA transcription and processing. In cancer cells, these changes can alter the expression of genes in the immune surveillance and cell death pathways. Here, we investigate how DNA damage impacts alternative polyadenylation (APA) using the PAPERCLIP technique. We find that APA shifts are a coordinated response for hundreds of genes to DNA damage, and we identify PCF11 as an important contributor of DNA damage-induced APA shifts. One of these APA shifts results in upregulation of the full-length MSL1 mRNA isoform, which protects cells from DNA damage-induced apoptosis and promotes cell survival from DNA-damaging agents. Importantly, blocking MSL1 upregulation enhances cytotoxicity of chemotherapeutic agents even in the absence of p53 and overcomes chemoresistance. Our study demonstrates that characterizing adaptive APA shifts to DNA damage has therapeutic implications and reveals a link between PCF11, the MSL complex, and DNA damage-induced apoptosis.

Problems with networks of coupled oscillators arise in multiple contexts, commonly leading to the question about the dependence of network dynamics on network structure. Previous work has addressed this question in Drosophila oogenesis, where stable cytoplasmic bridges connect the future oocyte to the supporting nurse cells that supply the oocyte with molecules and organelles needed for its development. To increase their biosynthetic capacity, nurse cells enter the endoreplication program, a special form of the cell cycle formed by the iterated repetition of growth and synthesis phases without mitosis. Recent studies have revealed that the oocyte orchestrates nurse cell endoreplication cycles, based on retrograde (oocyte to nurse cells) transport of a cell cycle inhibitor produced by the nurse cells and localized to the oocyte. Furthermore, the joint dynamics of endocycles has been proposed to depend on the intercellular connectivity within the oocyte-nurse cell cluster. We use a computational model to argue that this connectivity guides, but does not uniquely determine the collective dynamics and identify several oscillatory regimes, depending on the time scale of intercellular transport. Our results provide insights into collective dynamics of coupled cell cycles and motivate future quantitative studies of intercellular communication in the germline cell clusters.

One of the hallmarks of the cerebral cortex is the extreme diversity of interneurons. The two largest subtypes of cortical interneurons, parvalbumin- and somatostatin-positive cells, are morphologically and functionally distinct in adulthood but arise from common lineages within the medial ganglionic eminence.This makes them an attractive model for studying the generation of cell diversity. Here we examine how developmental changes in transcription and chromatin structure enable these cells to acquire distinct identities in the mouse cortex. Generic interneuron features are first detected upon cell cycle exit through the opening of chromatin at distal elements. By constructing cell-type-specific gene regulatory networks, we observed that parvalbumin- and somatostatin-positive cells initiate distinct programs upon settling within the cortex. We used these networks to model the differential transcriptional requirement of a shared regulator, Mef2c, and confirmed the accuracy of our predictions through experimental loss-of-function experiments. We therefore reveal how a common molecular program diverges to enable these neuronal subtypes to acquire highly specialized properties by adulthood. Our methods provide a framework for examining the emergence of cellular diversity, as well as for quantifying and predicting the effect of candidate genes on cell-type-specific development.

Well-conditioned boundary integral methods for the solution of elliptic boundary value problems (BVPs) are powerful tools for static and dynamic physical simulations. When there are many close-to-touching boundaries (eg, in complex fluids) or when the solution is needed in the bulk, nearly-singular integrals must be evaluated at many targets. We show that precomputing a linear map from surface density to an effective source representation renders this task highly efficient, in the common case where each object is "simple", ie, its smooth boundary needs only moderately many nodes. We present a kernel-independent method needing only an upsampled smooth surface quadrature, and one dense factorization, for each distinct shape. No (near-)singular quadrature rules are needed. The resulting effective sources are drop-in compatible with fast algorithms, with no local corrections nor bookkeeping. Our extensive numerical tests include 2D FMM-based Helmholtz and Stokes BVPs with up to 1000 objects (281000 unknowns), and a 3D Laplace BVP with 10 ellipsoids separated by 1/30 of a diameter. We include a rigorous analysis for analytic data in 2D and 3D.

The mRNA-1273 vaccine is effective against SARS-CoV-2 and was granted emergency use authorization by the FDA. Clinical studies, however, cannot provide the controlled response to infection and complex immunological insight that are only possible with preclinical studies. Hamsters are the only model that reliably exhibits severe SARS-CoV-2 disease similar to that in hospitalized patients, making them pertinent for vaccine evaluation. We demonstrate that prime or prime-boost administration of mRNA-1273 in hamsters elicited robust neutralizing antibodies, ameliorated weight loss, suppressed SARS-CoV-2 replication in the airways, and better protected against disease at the highest prime-boost dose. Unlike in mice and nonhuman primates, low-level virus replication in mRNA-1273–vaccinated hamsters coincided with an anamnestic response. Single-cell RNA sequencing of lung tissue permitted high-resolution analysis that is not possible in vaccinated humans. mRNA-1273 prevented inflammatory cell infiltration and the reduction of lymphocyte proportions, but enabled antiviral responses conducive to lung homeostasis. Surprisingly, infection triggered transcriptome programs in some types of immune cells from vaccinated hamsters that were shared, albeit attenuated, with mock-vaccinated hamsters. Our results support the use of mRNA-1273 in a 2-dose schedule and provide insight into the potential responses within the lungs of vaccinated humans who are exposed to SARS-CoV-2.

Braiding of topological structures in complex matter fields provides a robust framework for encoding and processing information, and it has been extensively studied in the context of topological quantum computation. In living systems, topological defects are crucial for the localization and organization of biochemical signaling waves, but their braiding dynamics remain unexplored. Here, we show that the spiral wave cores, which organize the Rho-GTP protein signaling dynamics and force generation on the membrane of starfish egg cells, undergo spontaneous braiding dynamics. Experimentally measured world line braiding exponents and topological entropy correlate with cellular activity and agree with predictions from a generic field theory. Our analysis further reveals the creation and annihilation of virtual quasi-particle excitations during defect scattering events, suggesting phenomenological parallels between quantum and living matter.

The famous Arrhenius equation is well suited to describing the temperature dependence of chemical reactions but has also been used for complicated biological processes. Here, we evaluate how well the simple Arrhenius equation predicts complex multi-step biological processes, using frog and fruit fly embryogenesis as two canonical models. We find that the Arrhenius equation provides a good approximation for the temperature dependence of embryogenesis, even though individual developmental intervals scale differently with temperature. At low and high temperatures, however, we observed significant departures from idealized Arrhenius Law behavior. When we model multi-step reactions of idealized chemical networks, we are unable to generate comparable deviations from linearity. In contrast, we find the two enzymes GAPDH and β-galactosidase show non-linearity in the Arrhenius plot similar to our observations of embryonic development. Thus, we find that complex embryonic development can be well approximated by the simple Arrhenius equation regardless of non-uniform developmental scaling and propose that the observed departure from this law likely results more from non-idealized individual steps rather than from the complexity of the system.