Quantitative Analysis of Cytokinesis In Situ during C. elegans Postembryonic Development

The physical separation of a cell into two daughter cells during cytokinesis requires cell-intrinsic shape changes driven by a contractile ring. However, in vivo, cells interact with their environment, which includes other cells. How cytokinesis occurs in tissues is not well understood. Here, we studied cytokinesis in an intact animal during tissue biogenesis. We used high-resolution microscopy and quantitative analysis to study the three rounds of division of the C. elegans vulval precursor cells (VPCs). The VPCs are cut in half longitudinally with each division. Contractile ring breadth, but not the speed of ring closure, scales with cell length. Furrowing speed instead scales with division plane dimensions, and scaling is consistent between the VPCs and C. elegans blastomeres. We compared our VPC cytokinesis kinetics data with measurements from the C. elegans zygote and HeLa and Drosophila S2 cells. Both the speed dynamics and asymmetry of ring closure are qualitatively conserved among cell types. Unlike in the C. elegans zygote but similar to other epithelial cells, Anillin is required for proper ring closure speed but not asymmetry in the VPCs. We present evidence that tissue organization impacts the dynamics of cytokinesis by comparing our results on the VPCs with the cells of the somatic gonad. In sum, this work establishes somatic lineages in post-embryonic C. elegans development as cell biological models for the study of cytokinesis in situ.