As Cells Divide Pull Together Proteins

It is a full-bodied structure made of a suite of team players, like a operating surgeon separating conjoined twins, cells have to be heedful to get everything just right when they divide in two. Otherwise, the ensuant daughter cells could be hobbled, especially if they end up with too many or two few chromosomes. A cleavage furrow of a dip called on the formation Successful cell division hangs., a process that has continued mysterious. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that no single molecular designer directs the cleavage furrow's formation; rather.

We accepted the cleavage furrow was like a finely tuned the Swiss watch, a key component part of would bring it to a stop in that breaking  -- we just didn't know what that component part was, says Douglas Robinson, Ph.D., a professor of cell biology in the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, borrowing an analogy from the late Ray Rappaport, the founding father of modern cell division research. "But it turned out to be more like an old Maine fishing boat: almost indestructible."

both during development and throughout an organism's life, cell division is how new cells form. To learn more about this process, Robinson and graduate student Vasudha Srivastava took the one-celled amoeba Dictyostelium as their model. One by one, they disabled genes for proteins known to be involved in the cleavage furrow to see whether doing so disrupted its assembly. But no matter which protein was taken out, other proteins still self-assembled to form the cleavage furrow. "It's not a house of cards -- pulling out one protein doesn't bring it down," Srivastava says. Instead, she and Robinson found a robust process tuned not only by chemical signaling, but also by mechanical processes.

Robinson says that makes sense,, given the importance of the cleavage furrow to life itself. "Cells need to get division right in order to avoid ending up with the wrong number of chromosomes, which can be fatal," he says

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