SISTER CELLS: This color-enhanced transmission electron micrograph shows the midbody (blue) linking two epithelial cells that have just divided.© DAVID M. PHILLIPS/SCIENCE SOURCE
During her search for a postdoctoral advisor in 1997, cell biologist Ahna Skop grew accustomed to getting turned down. Again and again, she rang the bell at the labs of faculty members only to have the door shut in her face. Her problem was that she was dead set on investigating what was, to many, an uninteresting vestige of cell division: the midbody.
The existing literature painted the midbody as “a garbage dump,” Skop recalls. Studies of mitosis had led researchers to believe that the small cluster of microtubules and proteins, found at the exact point where two daughter cells are last connected, was “stuff that just gets thrown away after cell division,” she says. But Skop thought the midbody was something more. Although the ...
