Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Rodenfels, J., Sartori, P., Golfier, S., Nagendra, K., Neugebauer, K. M., & Howard, J. Contribution of increasing plasma membrane to the energetic cost of early zebrafish embryogenesis. Molecular Biology of the Cell, 31(7), (2020): 520-526, doi:10.1091/mbc.E19-09-0529.
Description:
How do early embryos allocate the resources stored in the sperm and egg? Recently, we established isothermal calorimetry to measure heat dissipation by living zebrafish embryos and to estimate the energetics of specific developmental events. During the reductive cleavage divisions, the rate of heat dissipation increases from ∼60 nJ · s−1 at the two-cell stage to ∼90 nJ · s−1 at the 1024-cell stage. Here we ask which cellular process(es) drive this increasing energetic cost. We present evidence that the cost is due to the increase in the total surface area of all the cells of the embryo. First, embryo volume stays constant during the cleavage stage, indicating that the increase is not due to growth. Second, the heat increase is blocked by nocodazole, which inhibits DNA replication, mitosis, and cell division; this suggests some aspect of cell proliferation contributes to these costs. Third, the heat increases in proportion to the total cell surface area rather than total cell number. Fourth, the heat increase falls within the range of the estimated costs of maintaining and assembling plasma membranes and associated proteins. Thus, the increase in total plasma membrane associated with cell proliferation is likely to contribute appreciably to the total energy budget of the embryo.
Description:
The analysis of these data was initiated in the 2019 Physical Biology of the Cell course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. We acknowledge the support and feedback from the course directors and participants. This work was supported by funding from EMBO Long-Term Fellowship ALTF 754–2015 (to J.R.), the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Membership in Biology at the Institute for Advanced Study (to P.S.), National Institutes of Health (NIH) R21 HD094013 (to K.M.N.), and NIH R01 GM110386 (to J.H.). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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