M. Glotzer, A.W. Murray, M.W. Kirschner, "Cyclin is degraded by the ubiquitin pathway," Nature, 349:132-38, 1991.

Michael Glotzer (University of California, San Francisco): "A molecular understanding of the cell cycle has been emerging rapidly over the past few years. A class of proteins called cyclins regulates the cell cycle at several transition points. Tim Hunt and his students at Woods Hole discovered the first member of this family when they noticed it was synthesized and degraded during each cell cycle in early sea urchin embryos (Cell, 33:389-96, 1983). The periodic destruction of cyclin correlates precisely with the metaphase-to-anaphase transition. Many labs have now shown that cyclins activate the p34cdc2 protein kinase. My coauthors and I had found that exit from mitosis required cyclin degradation, but we knew nothing of the biochemical mechanism of this proteolytic reaction.

"In this work, we used recombinant cyclin model substrates that were radiolabeled to high...

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