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Molecular crowding in single eukaryotic cells: using cell environment biosensing and single-molecule optical microscopy to probe dependence on extracellular ionic strength, local glucose conditions, and sensor copy number

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 Added by Mark Leake
 Publication date 2020
  fields Biology
and research's language is English




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The physical and chemical environment inside cells is of fundamental importance to all life but has traditionally been difficult to determine on a subcellular basis. Here we combine cutting-edge genomically integrated FRET biosensing to readout localized molecular crowding in single live yeast cells. Confocal microscopy allows us to build subcellular crowding heatmaps using ratiometric FRET, while whole-cell analysis demonstrates crowding is reduced when yeast is grown in elevated glucose concentrations. Simulations indicate that the cell membrane is largely inaccessible to these sensors and that cytosolic crowding is broadly uniform across each cell over a timescale of seconds. Millisecond single-molecule optical microscopy was used to track molecules and obtain brightness estimates that enabled calculation of crowding sensor copy numbers. The quantification of diffusing molecule trajectories paves the way for correlating subcellular processes and the physicochemical environment of cells under stress.



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Cell division, aging, and stress recovery triggers spatial reorganization of cellular components in the cytoplasm, including membrane bound organelles, with molecular changes in their compositions and structures. However, it is not clear how these events are coordinated and how they integrate with regulation of molecular crowding. We use the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model system to study these questions using recent progress in optical fluorescence microscopy and crowding sensing probe technology. We used a F{o}rster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) based sensor, illuminated by confocal microscopy for high throughput analyses and Slimfield microscopy for single-molecule resolution, to quantify molecular crowding. We determine crowding in response to cellular growth of both mother and daughter cells, in addition to osmotic stress, and reveal hot spots of crowding across the bud neck in the burgeoning daughter cell. This crowding might be rationalized by the packing of inherited material, like the vacuole, from mother cells. We discuss recent advances in understanding the role of crowding in cellular regulation and key current challenges and conclude by presenting our recent advances in optimizing FRET-based measurements of crowding whilst simultaneously imaging a third color, which can be used as a marker that labels organelle membranes. Our approaches can be combined with synchronised cell populations to increase experimental throughput and correlate molecular crowding information with different stages in the cell cycle.
435 - Andrew S. Kennard 2014
The mean size of exponentially dividing E. coli cells cultured in different nutrient conditions is known to depend on the mean growth rate only. However, the joint fluctuations relating cell size, doubling time and individual growth rate are only starting to be characterized. Recent studies in bacteria (i) revealed the near constancy of the size extension in a single cell cycle (adder mechanism), and (ii) reported a universal trend where the spread in both size and doubling times is a linear function of the population means of these variables. Here, we combine experiments and theory and use scaling concepts to elucidate the constraints posed by the second observation on the division control mechanism and on the joint fluctuations of sizes and doubling times. We found that scaling relations based on the means both collapse size and doubling-time distributions across different conditions, and explain how the shape of their joint fluctuations deviates from the means. Our data on these joint fluctuations highlight the importance of cell individuality: single cells do not follow the dependence observed for the means between size and either growth rate or inverse doubling time. Our calculations show that these results emerge from a broad class of division control mechanisms (including the adder mechanism as a particular case) requiring a certain scaling form of the so-called division hazard rate function, which defines the probability rate of dividing as a function of measurable parameters. This gives a rationale for the universal body-size distributions observed in microbial ecosystems across many microbial species, presumably dividing with multiple mechanisms. Additionally, our experiments show a crossover between fast and slow growth in the relation between individual-cell growth rate and division time, which can be understood in terms of different regimes of genome replication control.
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