Length growth in fission yeast cells measured by two novel techniques

Abstract

Time-lapse films have shown that cells of the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe exhibit a sharp increase in the rate of length growth at one stage of the cell cycle and that the same periodic increase in growth rate, a cell-cycle event, occurs in a cell-cycle mutant after the DNA division cycle has been blocked1. The continued periodicity of cell-cycle events after such a block has been shown in other systems2,3 and has intriguing implications for cell-cycle control models. We have therefore developed two ney methods for measuring the rate of length growth which are equivalent to pulse labelling. The results confirm the evidence from films and also show that the rate of growth reaches a plateau after the blocked cells have achieved a critical size.