Correctly sized body parts are crucial for organismal function. For example, small discrepancies in limb length severely obstruct motility, and overgrowth of cardiac muscle is a prevalent cause of heart failure. The growth of different cells and organs must therefore be tightly coordinated to prevent that even small differences in growth rates amplify to large differences in size during development. How growth signals are propagated from cell to cell, and how organs integrate combinatorial signals from different tissues is a fundamental, yet poorly addressed question of high biomedical relevance. We address this question by combining live imaging and genetics using C. elegans with mathematical modelling.

We have developed time-lapse microscopy to precisely monitor the growth of the digestive tract of C. elegans in coordination with total body growth in hundreds of individual animals at high time resolution. Using these tools, we find a remarkable robustness of organ size that persists even under strong tissue-specific perturbation of growth and involves feedback control across multiple tissues. In a genetic screen, we identified a role for mechano-transduction via the transcriptional co-activator YAP-1 and stress signaling via p38 and Jun kinases in this control. We currently investigate how these conserved pathways coordinate growth in space and time during development to robustly yield an appropriate body plan.

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