Size scaling in collective cell growth. Author Rocky Diegmiller, Caroline Doherty, Tomer Stern, Jasmin Alsous, Stanislav Shvartsman Publication Year 2021 Type Journal Article Abstract Size is a fundamental feature of living entities and is intimately tied to their function. Scaling laws, which can be traced to D'Arcy Thompson and Julian Huxley, have emerged as a powerful tool for studying regulation of the growth dynamics of organisms and their constituent parts. Yet, throughout the 20th century, as scaling laws were established for single cells, quantitative studies of the coordinated growth of multicellular structures have lagged, largely owing to technical challenges associated with imaging and image processing. Here, we present a supervised learning approach for quantifying the growth dynamics of germline cysts during oogenesis. Our analysis uncovers growth patterns induced by the groupwise developmental dynamics among connected cells, and differential growth rates of their organelles. We also identify inter-organelle volumetric scaling laws, finding that nurse cell growth is linear over several orders of magnitude. Our approach leverages the ever-increasing quantity and quality of imaging data, and is readily amenable for studies of collective cell growth in other developmental contexts, including early mammalian embryogenesis and germline development. Keywords Animals, Cell Proliferation, Biological Evolution, Oogenesis, Developmental Biology, Germ Cells, Organelles, Diptera Journal Development Volume 148 Issue 18 Date Published 2021 Sep 15 ISSN Number 1477-9129 DOI 10.1242/dev.199663 Alternate Journal Development PMCID PMC8489028 PMID 34463760 PubMedPubMed CentralGoogle ScholarBibTeXEndNote X3 XML