Understanding mitotic nuclear remodeling from the comparative and synthetic biology perspectives constitutes the main thrust of our current research.
Mitotic division ensures faithful inheritance of genetic material in proliferating eukaryotic cells and errors in this process often lead to developmental defects and disease. Cellular genome is compartmentalized inside the nucleus delimited by the double-membrane nuclear envelope. The nuclear envelope must be dynamically restructured during mitosis to allow chromosome segregation and formation of the daughter nuclei.
cells perform this necessary task using a strikingly diverse
set of cell type- and organism-specific approaches, ranging
from fully “open” to fully “closed” mitosis depending on
whether and when the nuclear envelope breaks down or remains
intact. The recent focus on a relatively small cohort of model
systems has provided only limited insights into the extent and
the molecular basis of mitotic variability. By making use of
an “experiment of Nature”, comparative and synthetic analyses
of related eukaryotes utilizing distinct approaches to mitotic
division may add a new, evolutionary dimension to this
important field and provide a discovery tool capable of
challenging established paradigms and revealing fundamentally
novel biological principles.
We use two fission yeast species, Schizosaccharomyces pombe and Schizosaccharomyces japonicus that employ strikingly divergent mitotic strategies to address the following questions:
How is the nuclear envelope area controlled during mitotic division?
How do cells break and reform the nuclear membrane?
What are the rules for generating functional diversity in nuclear envelope management?
Copyright © 2016 by Snezhana Oliferenko