Inheritance of OCT4 predetermines fate choice in human embryonic stem cells.

It is well known that clonal cells can make different fate decisions, but it is unclear whether these decisions are determined during, or before, a cell's own lifetime. Here, we engineered an endogenous fluorescent reporter for the pluripotency factor OCT4 to study the timing of differentiation decisions in human embryonic stem cells. By tracking single-cell OCT4 levels over multiple cell cycle generations, we found that the decision to differentiate is largely determined before the differentiation stimulus is presented and can be predicted by a cell's preexisting OCT4 signaling patterns. We further quantified how maternal OCT4 levels were transmitted to, and distributed between, daughter cells. As mother cells underwent division, newly established OCT4 levels in daughter cells rapidly became more predictive of final OCT4 expression status. These results imply that the choice between developmental cell fates can be largely predetermined at the time of cell birth through inheritance of a pluripotency factor.

The Cell Cycle Browser: An Interactive Tool for Visualizing, Simulating, and Perturbing Cell-Cycle Progression.

The cell cycle is driven by precise temporal coordination among many molecular activities. To understand and explore this process, we developed the Cell Cycle Browser (CCB), an interactive web interface based on real-time reporter data collected in proliferating human cells. This tool facilitates visualizing, organizing, simulating, and predicting the outcomes of perturbing cell-cycle parameters. Time-series traces from individual cells can be combined to build a multi-layered timeline of molecular activities. Users can simulate the cell cycle using computational models that capture the dynamics of molecular activities and phase transitions. By adjusting individual expression levels and strengths of molecular relationships, users can predict effects on the cell cycle. Virtual assays, such as growth curves and flow cytometry, provide familiar outputs to compare cell-cycle behaviors for data and simulations. The CCB serves to unify our understanding of cell-cycle dynamics and provides a platform for generating hypotheses through virtual experiments.

Sequential replication-coupled destruction at G1/S ensures genome stability.

Timely ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation is fundamental to cell cycle control, but the precise degradation order at each cell cycle phase transition is still unclear. We investigated the degradation order among substrates of a single human E3 ubiquitin ligase, CRL4(Cdt2), which mediates the S-phase degradation of key cell cycle proteins, including Cdt1, PR-Set7, and p21. Our analysis of synchronized cells and asynchronously proliferating live single cells revealed a consistent order of replication-coupled destruction during both S-phase entry and DNA repair; Cdt1 is destroyed first, whereas p21 destruction is always substantially later than that of Cdt1. These differences are attributable to the CRL4(Cdt2) targeting motif known as the PIP degron, which binds DNA-loaded proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA(DNA)) and recruits CRL4(Cdt2). Fusing Cdt1's PIP degron to p21 causes p21 to be destroyed nearly concurrently with Cdt1 rather than consecutively. This accelerated degradation conferred by the Cdt1 PIP degron is accompanied by more effective Cdt2 recruitment by Cdt1 even though p21 has higher affinity for PCNA(DNA). Importantly, cells with artificially accelerated p21 degradation display evidence of stalled replication in mid-S phase and sensitivity to replication arrest. We therefore propose that sequential degradation ensures orderly S-phase progression to avoid replication stress and genome instability.

Individual pericentromeres display coordinated motion and stretching in the yeast spindle.

The mitotic segregation apparatus composed of microtubules and chromatin functions to faithfully partition a duplicated genome into two daughter cells. Microtubules exert extensional pulling force on sister chromatids toward opposite poles, whereas pericentric chromatin resists with contractile springlike properties. Tension generated from these opposing forces silences the spindle checkpoint to ensure accurate chromosome segregation. It is unknown how the cell senses tension across multiple microtubule attachment sites, considering the stochastic dynamics of microtubule growth and shortening. In budding yeast, there is one microtubule attachment site per chromosome. By labeling several chromosomes, we find that pericentromeres display coordinated motion and stretching in metaphase. The pericentromeres of different chromosomes exhibit physical linkage dependent on centromere function and structural maintenance of chromosomes complexes. Coordinated motion is dependent on condensin and the kinesin motor Cin8, whereas coordinated stretching is dependent on pericentric cohesin and Cin8. Linking of pericentric chromatin through cohesin, condensin, and kinetochore microtubules functions to coordinate dynamics across multiple attachment sites.

Pericentric chromatin loops function as a nonlinear spring in mitotic force balance.

The mechanisms by which sister chromatids maintain biorientation on the metaphase spindle are critical to the fidelity of chromosome segregation. Active force interplay exists between predominantly extensional microtubule-based spindle forces and restoring forces from chromatin. These forces regulate tension at the kinetochore that silences the spindle assembly checkpoint to ensure faithful chromosome segregation. Depletion of pericentric cohesin or condensin has been shown to increase the mean and variance of spindle length, which have been attributed to a softening of the linear chromatin spring. Models of the spindle apparatus with linear chromatin springs that match spindle dynamics fail to predict the behavior of pericentromeric chromatin in wild-type and mutant spindles. We demonstrate that a nonlinear spring with a threshold extension to switch between spring states predicts asymmetric chromatin stretching observed in vivo. The addition of cross-links between adjacent springs recapitulates coordination between pericentromeres of neighboring chromosomes.