Courtesy of Thea Goepfert
Section cut through the mammary gland of a rat that had been treated with the carcinogen MNU. Centrosomes (green) are arranged at the base of each nucleus (red), and 45% of cells show amplified chromosomes.
Comments from journal article reviewers often surprise or frusrate. But the reviewer response that cell biologist William Brinkley received six years ago left him stunned.
Brinkley and his collaborator, Subrata Sen at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, were looking to demonstrate that a protein found on centrosomes, the organizing centers for microtubules during mitosis, disrupted cell division and possibly triggered carcinogenesis. Reviewers praised the work, but declared it incomplete. Brinkley and his colleagues, they instructed, needed to experimentally demonstrate that the protein of interest, when inserted into a diploid cell and induced to produce in excess, actually generated more centrosomes and converted the cell to aneuploidy. Amazingly, the ...
