TY - GEN A1 - Rusch, Beate A1 - Peters-Kottig, Wolfgang A1 - Ceynowa, Klaus A1 - Dinter, Joachim A1 - Dubberke, Ina A1 - Happel, Hans-Gerd A1 - Hilliger, Kirsten A1 - Kitaeva, Xenia A1 - Kleineberg, Michael A1 - Koch, Thorsten A1 - Mc Leod, Shirley A1 - Mutter, Moritz A1 - Müller, Anja A1 - Seeliger, Frank A1 - Segger, Elisabeth A1 - Stanek, Ursula A1 - Wiese, Robert A1 - Wrzesinski, Marcel T1 - KOBV Jahresbericht 2023-2024 T3 - KOBV-Jahresbericht - 2023-2024 Y1 - 2025 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-100440 SN - 0934-5892 VL - 2023-2024 CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Okafornta, Chukwuebuka William A1 - Farhadifar, Reza A1 - Fabig, Gunar A1 - Wu, Hai-Yin A1 - Köckert, Maria A1 - Vogel, Martin A1 - Baum, Daniel A1 - Haase, Robert A1 - Shelley, Michael J. A1 - Needleman, Daniel J. A1 - Müller-Reichert, Thomas T1 - Cell size reduction scales spindle elongation but not chromosome segregation in C. elegans JF - bioRxiv N2 - How embryos adapt their internal cellular machinery to reductions in cell size during development remains a fundamental question in cell biology. Here, we use high-resolution lattice light-sheet fluorescence microscopy and automated image analysis to quantify lineage-resolved mitotic spindle and chromosome segregation dynamics from the 2– to 64–cell stages in Caenorhabditis elegans embryos. While spindle length scales with cell size across both wild-type and size-perturbed embryos, chromosome segregation dynamics remain largely invariant, suggesting that distinct mechanisms govern these mitotic processes. Combining femtosecond laser ablation with large-scale electron tomography, we find that central spindle microtubules mediate chromosome segregation dynamics and remain uncoupled from cell size across all stages of early development. In contrast, spindle elongation is driven by cortically anchored motor proteins and astral microtubules, rendering it sensitive to cell size. Incorporating these experimental results into an extended stoichiometric model for both the spindle and chromosomes, we find that allowing only cell size and microtubule catastrophe rates to vary reproduces elongation dynamics across development. The same model also accounts for centrosome separation and pronuclear positioning in the one-cell C. elegans embryo, spindle-length scaling across nematode species spanning ~100 million years of divergence, and spindle rotation in human cells. Thus, a unified stoichiometric framework provides a predictive, mechanistic account of spindle and nuclear dynamics across scales and species. Y1 - 2025 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.10.13.681585 ER -