{"doi":"10.1371/journal.pbio.3001639","title":"Binucleation ramps up gene expression meeting the physiological demands of an organism","abstract":"In this issue of PLOS Biology, van Rijnberk and colleagues show how polyploidy, via binucleation, enables Caenorhabditis elegans intestinal cells to ramp up gene expression supplying the oocytes with the necessary lipids for optimal organismal growth and reproductive fitness. Polyploidy results from the duplication (or more) of a cell's entire diploid genome and is recognized as a conserved and widespread mechanism for cell growth in development, tissue repair, and disease [1]. Polyploid cells are common in many organisms, including yeast, nematodes, plants, insects, fish, and mammals [2]. However, polyploid cells can exhibit distinct ploidy states in terms of both their nuclear ploidy and number of nuclei per cell. A key gap in our understanding is how a cell's ploidy state impacts cellular, tissue, organ, and organism physiology. In this issue of PLOS Biology, van Rijnberk and colleagues [3] utilize the Caenorhabditis elegans intestinal model to address this long-standing question. C. elegans intestinal cells normally arise by incomplete cell cycles known as endoreplication [1,2]. During larval development, the intestinal cells first undergo endomitosis, which truncates M phase prior to cell division (failed cytokinesis), generating a binucleated cell (Fig 1A). The intestinal cell then proceeds through 4 endocycles, cycling between G and S phases without an intervening M phase, doubling the nuclear genome content (C-value) and reaching a total cellular ploidy of 64C with 2, 32C nuclei (Fig 1A).","journal":"PLoS Biology","year":2022,"id":293752,"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":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9458,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":437908,"name":"Vicki P. Losick","orcid":"0000-0003-4608-2980","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":437907,"name":"Ari S. Dehn","orcid":"0000-0001-8600-8924","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":11,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:30:53.818562Z","pmid":"35613076","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":[]}