ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2001
A power law for cells.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2001. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 52 citations in OpenAlex.
- The human cell count and size distribution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Cell-based allometry: an approach for evaluation of complexity in morphogenesis.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2023Article
- Variance in Landscape Connectivity Shifts Microbial Population Scaling.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Neurodegeneration-related beta-amyloid as autocatabolism-attenuator in aIBRO reports · 2020Article
- Macroecological laws describe variation and diversity in microbial communities.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Raising the Connectome: The Emergence of Neuronal Activity and Behavior inFrontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2020Article
- The lens growth process.Progress in retinal and eye research · 2017Review
- A full lifespan model of vertebrate lens growth.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- Property of Fluctuations of Sales Quantities by Product Category in Convenience Stores.PloS one · 2016Article
- Stochastic multiplicative population growth predicts and interprets Taylor's power law of fluctuation scaling.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2013Article
- Optimality conditions for cell-fate heterogeneity that maximize the effects of growth factors in PC12 cells.PLoS computational biology · 2013Article
- Distributions of reproductive and somatic cell numbers in diverseEvolutionary ecology research · 2012Article
- Inferring Drosophila gap gene regulatory network: a parameter sensitivity and perturbation analysis.BMC systems biology · 2009Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Darwin observed that multiple, lowly organized, rudimentary, or exaggerated structures show increased relative variability. However, the cellular basis for these laws has never been investigated. Some animals, such as the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, are famous for having organs that possess the same number of cells in all individuals, a property known as eutely. But for most multicellular creatures, the extent of cell number variability is unknown. Here we estimate variability in organ cell number for a variety of animals, plants, slime moulds, and volvocine algae. We find that the mean and variance in cell number obey a power law with an exponent of 2, comparable to Taylor's law in ecological processes. Relative cell number variability, as measured by the coefficient of variation, differs widely across taxa and tissues, but is generally independent of mean cell number among homologous tissues of closely related species. We show that the power law for cell number variability can be explained by stochastic branching process models based on the properties of cell lineages. We also identify taxa in which the precision of developmental control appears to have evolved. We propose that the scale independence of relative cell number variability is maintained by natural selection.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.