Cell biologists have long thought that cytokinesis, the final step of cell division in which the cytoplasm and its contents are split, is necessary for the proper assortment of chromosomes. Disrupt this process, the prevailing wisdom held, and aneuploidy will result, with cancerous implications. But a team led by Mark Burkard at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has discovered a new type of cell division, dubbed ‘klerokinesis’, that protects cells from failed cytokinesis.
Using live-cell imaging, the researchers watched retinal pigment epithelial cells for five days after they had chemically inhibited cytokinesis. Reporting today at the American Society for Cell Biology’s annual meeting in San Francisco, they showed that many cells managed to split into two during the first growth phase of the next cell cycle—not during mitosis—allowing each to recover a normal chromosome set. Burkard says that therapeutic strategies that boost this type of nonmitotic cell fission could prevent cancer in people at high risk of developing tumors marked by abnormal chromosomal counts.
https://youtu.be/lKU-F3Pqyj8
Video courtesy of Mark Burkhard
Report this comment
This was shown in Dictyostelium in the seventies, and multiple times since. It has been named “type III” cytokinesis, or traction-mediated cytofission. You would be hard pressed to tell any difference between all the extant movies of Dictyostelium and this. It’s thus not “new” in the usual sense of that word, it’s just been shown, yet again, that biology that was thought to be specific to a model organism is in fact closer to universal.
It is enormously frustrating to us that partially work in model organisms to be told by referees that our papers cannot be accepted because they are “not applicable” to human cells. It’s wrong on so many different levels, but this work illustrates one – that “not applicable” usually means “nobody with appropriate skills looked yet”.
Report this comment
I whole-heartedly agree. Many innovations and discoveries have stemmed from research with model organisms… Research being judged as ‘non-applicable’ to human cells, is a pillarless judgement, especially in the case of novel discoveries which are brought forward to be deemed as exclusive observations, rather than potential platforms for development in other areas of scientific research. We should be facilitating academic persuit to ‘fill the gaps’ in current literature, to which forming links between model organisms and human cells is crucial to this. I feel that Sir Berners-Lee’s advocacy of ‘raw data now’, and open sourcing, is becoming ever-crucial to the modern industry of scientific research, especially in medicine. If we truly advocate the innovation and development of medicine, collaborative workspaces are paramount to the imminent demands of medicine.
https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide.html
Report this comment
Could be clearer to exclude normal endoreduplication.