LIKE MOTHER: Among budding yeast (left; same cells stained for vacuole markers at right) daughter cells require a mature vacuole to proceed through the cell cycle. YUI JIN AND LOIS WEISMAN
The paper Y. Jin, L.S. Weisman, “The vacuole/lysosome is required for cell-cycle progression,” eLife, 4:e08160, 2015. Organelles Cells ensure that daughter cells contain all their necessary organelles, but just how this occurs is not entirely clear. If a daughter yeast cell doesn’t inherit a vacuole, for instance, it will grow the organelle from scratch. Lois Weisman’s team at the University of Michigan hadn’t probed too deeply into this backup pathway until her postdoc Yui Jin recently asked what would happen if both routes to getting a vacuole were blocked. Stalled out Jin and Weisman developed a method to halt both vacuole inheritance and biogenesis in yeast, “and what happened was that [the cell] arrested at a very specific point in early G1,” says Weisman. After ...
