Hidden long-range memories of growth and cycle speed correlate cell cycles in lineage trees

Abstract

Cell heterogeneity may be caused by stochastic or deterministic effects. The inheritance of regulators through cell division is a key deterministic force, but identifying inheritance effects in a systematic manner has been challenging. Here we measure and analyze cell cycles in deep lineage trees of human cancer cells and mouse embryonic stem cells and develop a statistical framework to infer underlying rules of inheritance. The observed long-range intra-generational correlations in cell-cycle duration, up to second cousins, seem paradoxical because ancestral correlations decay rapidly. However, this correlation pattern is naturally explained by the inheritance of both cell size and cell-cycle speed over several generations, provided that cell growth and division are coupled through a minimum-size checkpoint. This model correctly predicts the effects of inhibiting cell growth or cycle progression. In sum, we show how fluctuations of cell cycles across lineage trees help understand the coordination of cell growth and division.