Robert E. Benoit Distinguished Lecture Series

The African clawed frog Xenopus has provided a powerful model for investigating vertebrate embryonic development for many decades. By crushing unfertilized frog eggs, it is also possible to prepare undiluted cytoplasmic extracts capable of reproducing many physiological processes of the cell in a test tube. This includes formation of the dynamic spindle apparatus responsible for accurately segregating chromosomes to daughter cells during cell division. I will describe experiments performed in my lab that have used Xenopus systems to investigate how the spindle forms and scales to cell size, which decreases exponentially during embryogenesis and differs across Xenopus species that possess different genome sizes. We also leverage the diversity of Xenopus species to understand scaling of metabolic rate with cell and animal size, and to investigate the basis of hybrid incompatibility of interspecies crosses. Although driven by curiosity, our NIH-funded research has important relevance to understanding cancer cells, which often exhibit defects in chromosome segregation as well as aberrant size and metabolism.