Nuclear DNA Content Varies with Cell Size across Human Cell Types

Abstract

Variation in the size of cells, and the DNA they contain, is a basic feature of multicellular organisms that affects countless aspects of their structure and function. Within humans, cell size is known to vary by several orders of magnitude, and differences in nuclear DNA content among cells have been frequently observed. Using published data, here we describe how the quantity of nuclear DNA across 19 different human cell types increases with cell volume. This observed increase is similar to intraspecific relationships between DNA content and cell volume in other species, and interspecific relationships between diploid genome size and cell volume. Thus, we speculate that the quantity of nuclear DNA content in somatic cells of humans is perhaps best viewed as a distribution of values that reflects cell size distributions, rather than as a single, immutable quantity.