The rate of cell growth is governed by cell cycle stage

Alexi I. Goranov; Michael Cook; Marketa Ricicova; Giora Ben-Ari; Christian Gonzalez; Carl Hansen; Mike Tyers; Angelika Amon

doi:10.1101/gad.1777309

The rate of cell growth is governed by cell cycle stage

¹David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, E17-233, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA;
²Centre for Systems Biology, Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Ontario M5G 1X5, Canada;
³Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A8, Canada;
⁴Centre for High-Throughput Biology, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada;
⁵Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JR, Scotland, United Kingdom

Abstract

Cell growth is an essential requirement for cell cycle progression. While it is often held that growth is independent of cell cycle position, this relationship has not been closely scrutinized. Here we show that in budding yeast, the ability of cells to grow changes during the cell cycle. We find that cell growth is faster in cells arrested in anaphase and G1 than in other cell cycle stages. We demonstrate that the establishment of a polarized actin cytoskeleton—either as a consequence of normal cell division or through activation of the mating pheromone response—potently attenuates protein synthesis and growth. We furthermore show by population and single-cell analysis that growth varies during an unperturbed cell cycle, slowing at the time of polarized growth. Our study uncovers a fundamental relationship whereby cell cycle position regulates growth.