Cell Cycle Studies In Full Spin During The Last Few Years

While scientists have known for centuries that cells divide, only during the last couple of decades have researchers really begun to make progress in investigating the how's and why's of the division. Understanding the driving mechanisms involved--the chemical triggers-- will help scientists determine why this process sometimes goes wrong (as in the case of cancer cell growth) and, someday, may also spur the development of methods to prevent and reverse such malfunctions. Jonathon Pines, a visi

Written byAngela Martello

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The flurry of research on cell division was made possible by a union of several disciplines: yeast genetics, cell biology, and biochemistry. "Several different areas of research have converged," says Sergio Mor-eno, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford. "Many people suddenly realized that they were working on the same thing."

Pines concurs: "Yeast geneticists realized they were working on the same protein as cell biologists who were working on extracts from cells because the biochemists came along and purified the proteins."

The proteins that these various research groups were (and still are) investigating are the components of maturation-promoting factor (MPF), a chemical signal that induces both meiotic and mitotic cell division. Two independent research groups--one from Yale University and one from Argonne National Laboratory--discovered MPF in the early 1970s. Further studies revealed that the amount of MPF in a cell rises and falls with each mitotic division. ...

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