1. Stem cells and cell size
In multicellular organisms, homeostatic control mechanisms are regulated so that internal conditions ensuring cell number and size remain stable and relatively constant (reviewed in [1]). These control mechanisms are an integration of extracellular nutritional environments and multiple cell-specific growth, mitogenic, and survival signals that coalesce to create a balanced homeostatic state in terms of rates of synthesis and degradation of macromolecules, and thus cell size. The majority of animal cells are 10–20 μm in diameter and rarely vary more than 2-fold outside of this range suggesting that the mechanism for cell size regulation is highly conserved [2]. Nonetheless, the mechanisms that control cell size and the relationship between cell growth (cell mass increase over time), cell division, and cell lifespan remain poorly understood.
A correlation between size and lifespan was first observed in yeast [3] and similar observations have also been made in mammalian cells. For example, as yeast cells approach quiescence, proliferation slows but cell growth continues, and thus cells increase in size with age. Mammalian cells in vivo also steadily increase in size with age. In a recent study, a genetic link between cell size, growth rate and lifespan has been reported in yeast cells [4]. Authors show that mutations that increase cell size concomitantly increase growth rate and decrease life span. Thus, small cell mutants age slowly and are long-lived while large cells grow, divide and age dramatically faster in comparison. Specifically, intracellular RNA and protein contents increase with age, even though the synthesis of macromolecules decreases, and these elevations contribute to the increase in the cell size, numbers of inclusion bodies, and other cellular components [5].
Cell growth and proliferation are distinct processes that both require extensive instructive signals. It is unclear what types of mechanisms coordinate cellular growth and the cell cycle in metazoan cells. It has been suggested that commitment to proliferation is dependent upon the attainment of a minimum “critical cell size” [6] and [7]. In support, large cells tend to divide faster than small cells [8]. One group found that both the expression and the activity of G1-phase cyclins are modulated by growth rate and cell size in yeast, suggesting that the proliferative capacity correlates with cell size and cell growth rates, such that the largest cells begin to proliferate five times faster than the smallest cells [9]. Other experiments in mammalian cells support the conclusion that cell size correlates closely with the proliferative potential of cells [10], [11] and [12]. Another group examined cell size distributions in lymphoblasts and showed that growth rate is size-dependent throughout the cell cycle. Alternatively, authors concluded that cell division probability varies independently with cell size and age, indicating that mammalian cells have an intrinsic mechanism for cell size maintenance [13].
Mammalian adult stem cells are rare, long-living cells with the inherent traits of both indefinite self-renewal and multilineage differentiation capabilities [14]. Thus, stem cells normally divide asymmetrically into a new stem cell and a committed progenitor, the latter of which has limited self-renewing ability and can give rise to progeny that are more restricted in their differentiating potential and finally to functionally mature cells. Between the two, primitive stem cells are generally smaller than differentiated cells. Stem cells are also generally detected in a predominantly quiescent state, a reversible arrest in proliferation as determined by an integration of diverse antimitogenic signals. The proliferative and quiescent states have vastly different metabolic needs, the former requiring tremendous metabolic energy in order to synthesize DNA, protein, and lipids. Indeed, quiescent cells are widely reported to exhibit reduced nucleotide synthesis, as well as reduced metabolic activity and cell size. As expected, most studies that look at cell size have described stem cells to be much smaller in size than the more committed and highly proliferative cells. For example, in murine bone marrow (BM), hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are small measuring between 4 and 5 μm [15] and [16]. Another group described human BM HSCs (Lin−CD34+c-Kit+) to be small at ∼6 μm [17]. Neuroblasts (neural stem cells) and myoblasts are notably smaller than their differentiated daughter cells, i.e., neurons and skeletal muscle cells, respectively. The presence of heterogeneous CD34+CD45− nonhematopoietic tissue-committed, putative stem cells that measure 5–7 μm has also been described [18]. Finally, small pluripotent epiblastic-like cells of 8–10 μm from the rat skeletal muscle [19], very small embryonic-like (VSEL) stem cells of 3 μm from the bone marrow [20], very small stem cell-like cells (2–4 μm) that express embryonic markers such as SSEA-4, Oct-4, Nanog, Sox-2, and c-kit in the human ovarian surface epithelium [21] have been reported. Whether these latter, small-sized, putative stem cells truly possess stem cell properties (i.e., self-renewal and multi-lineage differentiation) has not been rigorously examined and remains somewhat controversial.
Identification of different sized subpopulations has been largely based on regular light or electron microscopy [15], [16], [17] and [18], fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) [22], size-sieving methods [23], centrifugal elutriation, and long-term culture under specific conditions [24] (Fig. 1). These methods have been instrumental in producing evidence that cell size is related to cell cycle [25], cell proliferation [26], [27] and [28], and differentiation [29] and [30]. For example, the differentiation marker involucrin has been reported to correlate with increasing cell size and terminal differentiation in human epidermal cultures [31]. In studies utilizing human epidermal keratinocytes, the smallest cells sorted by centrifugal elutriation expressed the highest levels of basal cell markers (p63 and basonuclin) and possessed the greatest clonogenicity in culture [26], [28] and [30]. Vice versa, the proliferative potential of human fibroblasts and keratinocytes was shown to be inversely dependent on cell size [26] and [27].