WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, MASUR
When yeast cells divide, they retain their own damaged proteins to produce daughter cells with immaculate cytoplasms, essentially resetting their age and giving the lineage immortality. While a decade of research has indicated that the mother’s cytoskeleton shoots out actin fibers to actively regulate this process, a paper published today in Cell turns this theory on its head, suggesting that slow diffusion and cell geometry are all that’s needed to keep damaged proteins from entering the new cells.
“What this paper does is it demystifies something that’s very fundamental: how do you generate a daughter cell that doesn’t carry the aging components of an aging cell?” said molecular biologist Susan Gasser, director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Switzerland who was not ...
