A rich get richer effect governs intracellular condensate size distributions

Abstract

Phase separation of biomolecules into condensates has emerged as a ubiquitous mechanism for intracellular organization and impacts many intracellular processes, including reaction pathways through clustering of enzymes and their intermediates. Precise and rapid spatiotemporal control of reactions by condensates requires tuning of their sizes. However, the physical processes that govern the distribution of condensate sizes remain unclear. Here, we utilize a combination of synthetic and native condensates to probe the underlying physical mechanisms determining condensate size. We find that both native nuclear speckles and FUS condensates formed with the synthetic Corelet system obey an exponential size distribution, which can be recapitulated in Monte Carlo simulations of fast nucleation followed by coalescence. By contrast, pathological aggregation of cytoplasmic Huntingtin polyQ protein exhibits a power-law size distribution, with an exponent of -1.41 {+/-} 0.02. These distinct behaviors reflect the relative importance of nucleation and coalescence kinetics: introducing continuous condensate nucleation into the Monte Carlo coarsening simulations gives rise to polyQ-like power-law behavior. We demonstrate that the emergence of power-law distributions under continuous nucleation reflects a "rich get richer" effect, whose extent may play a general role in the determination of condensate size distributions.