Organ growth without cell division: somatic polyploidy in a moth,Ephestia kuehniella

Abstract

Organ growth depends on cell division and (or) cell growth. Here, we present a study on two organs whose growth depends entirely on cell growth, once they are formed in the embryo: Malpighian tubules and silk glands of the flour moth, Ephestia kuehniella . Between first and last larval instar, the volume of Malpighian tubule cells increases by a factor of ∼1800 and that of silk gland cells by a factor of ∼3100. We determined the number of endocyles required to reach these stages by Feulgen cytometry. Cells of Malpighian tubules were in the 2C stage in first instar larvae and reached 1024C after 9 endocycles in last instar larvae (1C = 0.45 pg DNA). Silk gland cells already reached a DNA content of 8C–16C in first instar larvae and attained up to 8192C in last instar larvae after a total of 12 endocycles. The nuclei were small and more or less spherical in first instar larvae, but they were huge, flat, and bizarrely branched in last instar larvae. We consider branching as a compensatory adaptation to improve molecular traffic between nucleus and cytoplasm in these excessively large and highly polyploid cells (i) by reducing the mean distance between nucleus and cytoplasm and (ii) by enlarging the surface-to-volume ratio of these nuclei.