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XB-PERS-4838
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Name: Dr. Clotilde Cadart
Position: Post-doctoral Fellow
Research Description:
Cell size, ploidy and metabolism in different species. t's very commonly known that – within an individual – there's a correlation between the amount of genome in a cell and cell size: polyploid cells like hepatocytes or muscle cells are much larger than, for example, diploid epithelial cells. This is also true across species, and this has been characterised a lot in frogs. Secondly, and this is less well understood, there are correlations between genome size and organismal variables like developmental rate. My intuition was that the link might be cell size-dependent changes in cellular physiology or metabolism, and this is what I set out to study. Briefly, the findings from my postdoc were that when ploidy increases, cell size increases and whole embryo metabolic rate decreases. I managed to develop a quantitative framework to assess where the energy goes in an embryo – how much goes towards growing and how much towards maintaining what already exists. What I found is that maintenance costs less energy when you are made of fewer larger cells, because the costs associated with plasma membrane maintenance are reduced in cells that are large and have a lower surface area to volume ratio. And what was then really fun was that I could compare across frog species to show that the correlation was between metabolic rate and cell size, rather than genome size.
Lab Memberships
Heald Lab
(Post-doc, Alumni)