Maintaining robust size across environmental conditions through plastic brain growth dynamics

Cobham, Ansa Emmanuel; Neumann, Brent; Mirth, Christen K.

doi:10.1101/2020.09.01.277046

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 77 publications

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“…Robustness in development is a longstanding problem given that many of the underlying processes are plastic in nature (57). For example, under starvation, growth of the ovaries is delayed in the Drosophila larvae (58), whereas the brain continues to develop similarly to healthy conditions for a substantially longer period (59)(60)(61). The VNC is constructed of a highly stereotypic repetition of specific neurons and connections (34,62).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scaling of internal organs during Drosophila embryonic development

Tiwari

Rengarajan

Saunders

2021

Biophysical Journal

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Many species show a diverse range of sizes; for example, domestic dogs have large variation in body mass. Yet, the internal structure of the organism remains similar, i.e., the system scales to organism size. Drosophila melanogaster has been a powerful model system for exploring scaling mechanisms. In the early embryo, gene expression boundaries scale very precisely to embryo length. Later in development, the adult wings grow with remarkable symmetry and scale well with animal size. Yet, our knowledge of whether internal organs initially scale to embryo size remains largely unknown. Here, we utilize artificially small Drosophila embryos to explore how three critical internal organs-the heart, hindgut, and ventral nerve cord (VNC)-adapt to changes in embryo morphology. We find that the heart scales precisely with embryo length. Intriguingly, reduction in cardiac cell length, rather than number, appears to be important in controlling heart length. The hindgut, which is the first chiral organ to form, displays scaling with embryo size under large-scale changes in the artificially smaller embryos but shows few hallmarks of scaling within wild-type size variation. Finally, the VNC only displays weak scaling behavior; even large changes in embryo geometry result in only small shifts in VNC length. This suggests that the VNC may have an intrinsic minimal length that is largely independent of embryo length. Overall, our work shows that internal organs can adapt to embryo size changes in Drosophila, but the extent to which they scale varies significantly between organs.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scaling of internal organs during Drosophila embryonic development

Tiwari

Rengarajan

Saunders

2021

Biophysical Journal

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“…Data accessibility. Data from this paper are available as figures and tables as well as included in the electronic supplementary material [64].…”

Section: Authors' Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maintaining robust size across environmental conditions through plastic brain growth dynamics

2022

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Organ growth is tightly regulated across environmental conditions to generate an appropriate final size. While the size of some organs is free to vary, others need to maintain constant size to function properly. This poses a unique problem: how is robust final size achieved when environmental conditions alter key processes that regulate organ size throughout the body, such as growth rate and growth duration? While we know that brain growth is ‘spared’ from the effects of the environment from humans to fruit flies, we do not understand how this process alters growth dynamics across brain compartments. Here, we explore how this robustness in brain size is achieved by examining differences in growth patterns between the larval body, the brain and a brain compartment—the mushroom bodies—in Drosophila melanogaster across both thermal and nutritional conditions. We identify key differences in patterns of growth between the whole brain and mushroom bodies that are likely to underlie robustness of final organ shape. Further, we show that these differences produce distinct brain shapes across environments.

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Maintaining robust size across environmental conditions through plastic brain growth dynamics

Cited by 2 publications

References 77 publications

Scaling of internal organs during Drosophila embryonic development

Scaling of internal organs during Drosophila embryonic development

Maintaining robust size across environmental conditions through plastic brain growth dynamics

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