What is it about?
Cells vary enormously in size across different organisms, but it is not clear how such diversity evolves without disrupting normal cellular functions. We used laboratory evolution to select for progressively smaller yeast cells and found that cells can become about four times smaller while remaining healthy and relatively fit. By identifying the genetic changes responsible, we uncovered a set of conserved cellular pathways that can tune cell size, providing a possible mechanism for how cell size evolves in nature.
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Why is it important?
Our work shows that large changes in cell size can evolve gradually through modifications of existing cellular control systems, without severely compromising cellular performance. This helps explain how the wide range of cell sizes observed in nature may have arisen over evolutionary time.
Perspectives
One of the things I find most exciting about biology is that even seemingly simple questions—such as why cells have the sizes they do—remain largely unanswered. This study is our first dive into that question, and our laboratory is continuing these experiments to explore the limits of cell size and their implications for cellular life.
Dr. Marco Fumasoni
Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Experimental evolution of cellular miniaturization reveals a putative mechanism for cell size evolution, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2531280123.
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