Transcriptional repression of central spindle factors controls endomitosis in the C. elegans intestine

During development, many cell types transition from canonical to non-canonical cell cycles, such as endomitosis and endoreplication, in which they duplicate their DNA but do not divide, giving rise to polyploidy. Little is known on the regulation of endomitosis, where cells enter M phase, but do not perform cytokinesis. Here, we investigate how cells initiate and execute endomitosis in the C. elegans intestine and find that endomitotic cells fail to assemble a central spindle or initiate cytokinetic furrowing. We find that endomitotic cells transcriptionally repress multiple cytokinesis regulators, especially the central spindle factors ZEN-4Mklp1, CYK-4RacGap1 and SPD-1Prc1. Intestinal cells lose the capacity to perform cytokinesis in late embryogenesis, and we find that the conserved DREAM (DP, RB-related, E2F and MuvB) complex is involved in the repression of central spindle genes. Together, our work demonstrates that the transition to endomitosis is a well-defined switch that relies on the transcriptional repression of cytokinesis genes.