Switching from weak to strong cortical attachment of microtubules accounts for the transition from nuclear centration to spindle elongation in metazoans

The centrosome is a major microtubule organizing center in animal cells. The position of the centrosomes inside the cell is important for cell functions such as cell cycle, and thus should be tightly regulated. Theoretical models based on the forces generated along the microtubules have been proposed to account for the dynamic movements of the centrosomes during the cell cycle. These models, however, often adopted inconsistent assumptions to explain distinct but successive movements, thus preventing a unified model for centrosome positioning. For the centration of the centrosomes, weak attachment of the astral microtubules to the cell cortex was assumed. In contrast, for the separation of the centrosomes during spindle elongation, strong attachment was assumed. Here, we mathematically analyzed these processes at steady state and found that the different assumptions are proper for each process. We experimentally validated our conclusion using nematode and sea urchin embryos by manipulating their shapes. Our results suggest the existence of a molecular mechanism that converts the cortical attachment from weak to strong during the transition from centrosome centration to spindle elongation.

Drug-target identification in COVID-19 disease mechanisms using computational systems biology approaches

Introduction

The COVID-19 Disease Map project is a large-scale community effort uniting 277 scientists from 130 Institutions around the globe. We use high-quality, mechanistic content describing SARS-CoV-2-host interactions and develop interoperable bioinformatic pipelines for novel target identification and drug repurposing.

Methods

Extensive community work allowed an impressive step forward in building interfaces between Systems Biology tools and platforms. Our framework can link biomolecules from omics data analysis and computational modelling to dysregulated pathways in a cell-, tissue- or patient-specific manner. Drug repurposing using text mining and AI-assisted analysis identified potential drugs, chemicals and microRNAs that could target the identified key factors.

Results

Results revealed drugs already tested for anti-COVID-19 efficacy, providing a mechanistic context for their mode of action, and drugs already in clinical trials for treating other diseases, never tested against COVID-19.

Discussion

The key advance is that the proposed framework is versatile and expandable, offering a significant upgrade in the arsenal for virus-host interactions and other complex pathologies.

Intercellular interaction mechanisms promote diversity in intracellular ATP concentration in Escherichia coli populations

In fluctuating environments, many microorganisms acquire phenotypic heterogeneity as a survival tactic to increase the likelihood of survival of the overall population. One example of this interindividual heterogeneity is the diversity of ATP concentration among members of Escherichia coli populations under glucose deprivation. Despite the importance of such environmentally driven phenotypic heterogeneity, how the differences in intracellular ATP concentration emerge among individual E. coli organisms is unknown. In this study, we focused on the mechanism through which individual E. coli achieve high intracellular ATP concentrations. First, we measured the ATP retained by E. coli over time when cultured at low (0.1 mM) and control (22.2 mM) concentrations of glucose and obtained the chronological change in ATP concentrations. Then, by comparing these chronological change of ATP concentrations and analyzing whether stochastic state transitions, periodic oscillations, cellular age, and intercellular communication-which have been reported as molecular biological mechanisms for generating interindividual heterogeneity-are involved, we showed that the appearance of high ATP-holding individuals observed among E. coli can be explained only by intercellular transmission. By performing metabolomic analysis of post-culture medium, we revealed a significant increase in the ATP, especially at low glucose, and that the number of E. coli that retain significantly higher ATP can be controlled by adding large amounts of ATP to the medium, even in populations cultured under control glucose concentrations. These results reveal for the first time that ATP-mediated intercellular transmission enables some individuals in E. coli populations grown at low glucose to retain large amounts of ATP.

3D convolutional neural networks-based segmentation to acquire quantitative criteria of the nucleus during mouse embryogenesis

During embryogenesis, cells repeatedly divide and dynamically change their positions in three-dimensional (3D) space. A robust and accurate algorithm to acquire the 3D positions of the cells would help to reveal the mechanisms of embryogenesis. To acquire quantitative criteria of embryogenesis from time-series 3D microscopic images, image processing algorithms such as segmentation have been applied. Because the cells in embryos are considerably crowded, an algorithm to segment individual cells in detail and accurately is needed. To quantify the nuclear region of every cell from a time-series 3D fluorescence microscopic image of living cells, we developed QCANet, a convolutional neural network-based segmentation algorithm for 3D fluorescence bioimages. We demonstrated that QCANet outperformed 3D Mask R-CNN, which is currently considered as the best algorithm of instance segmentation. We showed that QCANet can be applied not only to developing mouse embryos but also to developing embryos of two other model species. Using QCANet, we were able to extract several quantitative criteria of embryogenesis from 11 early mouse embryos. We showed that the extracted criteria could be used to evaluate the differences between individual embryos. This study contributes to the development of fundamental approaches for assessing embryogenesis on the basis of extracted quantitative criteria.

Identification of a master transcription factor and a regulatory mechanism for desiccation tolerance in the anhydrobiotic cell line Pv11

Water is essential for living organisms. Terrestrial organisms are incessantly exposed to the stress of losing water, desiccation stress. Avoiding the mortality caused by desiccation stress, many organisms acquired molecular mechanisms to tolerate desiccation. Larvae of the African midge, Polypedilum vanderplanki, and its embryonic cell line Pv11 tolerate desiccation stress by entering an ametabolic state, anhydrobiosis, and return to active life after rehydration. The genes related to desiccation tolerance have been comprehensively analyzed, but transcriptional regulatory mechanisms to induce these genes after desiccation or rehydration remain unclear. Here, we comprehensively analyzed the gene regulatory network in Pv11 cells and compared it with that of Drosophila melanogaster, a desiccation sensitive species. We demonstrated that nuclear transcription factor Y subunit gamma-like, which is important for drought stress tolerance in plants, and its transcriptional regulation of downstream positive feedback loops have a pivotal role in regulating various anhydrobiosis-related genes. This study provides an initial insight into the systemic mechanism of desiccation tolerance.

Predicting the future direction of cell movement with convolutional neural networks

Image-based deep learning systems, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have recently been applied to cell classification, producing impressive results; however, application of CNNs has been confined to classification of the current cell state from the image. Here, we focused on cell movement where current and/or past cell shape can influence the future cell movement. We demonstrate that CNNs prospectively predicted the future direction of cell movement with high accuracy from a single image patch of a cell at a certain time. Furthermore, by visualizing the image features that were learned by the CNNs, we could identify morphological features, e.g., the protrusions and trailing edge that have been experimentally reported to determine the direction of cell movement. Our results indicate that CNNs have the potential to predict the future direction of cell movement from current cell shape, and can be used to automatically identify those morphological features that influence future cell movement.