Cell division quality control 'stopwatch' uncovered

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2024-04-01 20:00:02

Each day, hundreds of billions of cells in our body cycle through a period of growth and division. Yet in that time, only about 30 minutes is spent on the critical orchestration of mitosis, when chromosomes are carefully segregated from one parent cell to the next generation of two daughter cells.

It's during this crucial period of cell division that things can go haywire. Chromosomes can be misdirected, leading to damaged and diseased cells that progress to different types of cancer. University of California San Diego scientists reporting in the journal Science have found a key mechanism that keeps track of mitosis timing and takes note when the process takes too long. Researchers with the labs of Professors Arshad Desai and Karen Oegema in the School of Biological Sciences and School of Medicine have, for the first time, described the details of the mitosis "stopwatch" and the ways that suspicious cells are detected and stopped from further proliferating.

"This work shows that cells carefully monitor the time taken to execute mitosis and use that as a filter to eliminate potentially problematic cells," said Desai, a faculty member in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology. "If a cell takes longer than normal to complete mitosis, then daughter cells will know that their mother struggled to execute mitosis and they'll stop dividing as a safety measure."