Control of tissue development by cell-cycle dependent transcriptional filtering

Cell cycle duration changes dramatically during development, starting out fast to generate cells quickly and slowing down over time as the organism matures. The cell cycle can also act as a transcriptional filter to control expression of long genes which can’t be completely transcribed in short cycles. Using mathematical simulations of cell proliferation, we identify an emergent property, that this filter can act as a tuning knob to control cell fate, cell diversity and the number and proportion of different cell types in a tissue. Our predictions are supported by comparison to single-cell RNA-seq data captured over development. Our results support the idea that cell cycle dynamics may be important across multicellular eukaryotes for controlling gene expression and cell fate.