Cells multiply and divide millions of times each day in our bodies, but researchers still don't know exactly which genes are involved in mitosis. The linkurl:MitoCheck;http://www.mitocheck.org/ consortium, a European research collaboration, aims to change that. Like sports trainers filming individual players to dissect the finer points of their games, MitoCheck researchers capture individual cells dividing to tease apart the contributions of individual genes to the process of mitosis. The consortium has taken videotaping to a whole new level by generating 190,000 time-lapse photographs of mitosis, meticulously filming the inactivation of approximately 21,000 genes, one at a time, to determine their effects on cell division. Their efforts may shed new light on tumorigenesis. "We now have much better molecular inventory of one of the important steps in early development of human cancers," says linkurl:Jan Ellenberg;http://www.embl.de/ExternalInfo/ellenberg/homepage/labmembers.html a cell biologist at the European Molecular Biological Laboratory (EMBL) and MitoCheck coordinator. "We now have...
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