The cell cycle and cell size influence the rates of global cellular translation and transcription in fission yeast

How the production of biomass is controlled as cells increase in size and proceed through the cell cycle events is important for understanding the regulation of global cellular growth. This has been studied for decades but has not yielded consistent results, probably due to perturbations induced by the synchronisation methods used in most previous studies. To avoid this problem, we have developed a system to analyse unperturbed exponentially growing populations of fission yeast cells. We generated thousands of fixed single-cell measurements of cell size, cell cycle stage and the levels of global cellular translation and transcription. We show that translation scales with size, and additionally, increases at late S-phase/early G2 and early in mitosis and decreases later in mitosis, suggesting that cell cycle controls are also operative over global cellular translation. Transcription increases with both size and the amount of DNA, suggesting that the level of transcription of a cell may be the result of a dynamic equilibrium between the number of RNA polymerases associating and disassociating from DNA.

Automated summary

The control of biomass production during cell growth and cell cycle progression has been a subject of extensive study. However, previous studies using synchronization methods have yielded inconsistent results. To address this issue, we developed a system to analyze unperturbed exponentially growing fission yeast cells. We obtained thousands of fixed single-cell measurements, which revealed that translation scales with cell size and is regulated by cell cycle events. Additionally, transcription levels were found to be correlated with cell size and the amount of DNA.