J. Gautier, C. Norbury, M. Lohka, P. Nurse, J. Maller, "Purified maturation- promoting factor contains the product of a Xenopus homolog of the fission yeast cell cycle control gene cdc2+," Cell, 54, 433-9, 29 July 1988.
Jean Gautier (University of California, San Francisco): "The reason this article is cited often is that our findings unified for the first time a large number of apparently unrelated genetic and biochemical approaches using a wide variety of organisms.
"MPF [maturation-promoting factor] was known as a universal mitotic inducer for more than 17 years.
"In this study, we demon- strated that one of the two components of highly purified MPF was the Xenopus homolog of the yeast cell cycle control gene cdc2+. Both MPF and cdc2 genes were known to be present in phylogenetically diverse organisms; therefore, the identification of MPF as the product of a cdc2 gene was very important for the research ...
