{"doi":"10.1038/s41467-024-54752-7","title":"Spatial heterogeneity accelerates phase-to-trigger wave transitions in frog egg extracts","abstract":"Cyclin-dependent kinase 1 (Cdk1) activity rises and falls throughout the cell cycle: a cell-autonomous process called mitotic oscillations. Mitotic oscillators can synchronize when spatially coupled, facilitating rapid, synchronous divisions in large early embryos of Drosophila (~0.5 mm) and Xenopus (~1.2 mm). Diffusion alone cannot achieve such long-range coordination. Instead, studies proposed mitotic waves—phase and trigger waves—as mechanisms of the coordination. How waves establish over time remains unclear. Using Xenopus laevis egg extracts and a Cdk1 Förster resonance energy transfer sensor, we observe a transition from phase to trigger wave dynamics in initially homogeneous cytosol. Spatial heterogeneity promotes this transition. Adding nuclei accelerates entrainment. The system transitions almost immediately when driven by metaphase-arrested extracts. Numerical simulations suggest phase waves appear transiently as trigger waves take time to entrain the system. Therefore, we show that both waves belong to a single biological process capable of coordinating the cell cycle over long distances. Using Xenopus laevis egg extracts and a Cdk1 FRET sensor, the authors demonstrate how rapid cell cycles achieve long-range cytoplasmic synchronization through mitotic waves. In this process, trigger waves gradually replace transient phase waves, with spatial heterogeneities accelerating the transition.","journal":"Nature Communications","year":2024,"id":439379,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":10,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9564,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1250100,"name":"Daniel Ruiz-Reynés","orcid":"0000-0003-0085-8421","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":470991,"name":"Franco Tavella","orcid":"0000-0001-5997-6241","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":812476,"name":"Minjun Jin","orcid":"0000-0003-4744-9094","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1250101,"name":"Yeonghoon Kim","orcid":"0000-0002-1292-250X","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":459951,"name":"Lendert Gelens","orcid":"0000-0001-7290-9561","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":470993,"name":"Qiong Yang","orcid":"0000-0002-2442-2094","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1250099,"name":"Owen Puls","orcid":"0000-0002-5097-3420","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":56,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:00:47.992543Z","pmid":"39622792","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}