WOODS HOLE, Mass., March 9 (UPI) -- A U.S.-led group of international scientists has described newly discovered interactions that occur to a human chromosome within a dividing cell.
The Marine Biological Laboratory-led scientists said understanding the forces that drive chromosome segregation -- a crucial aspect of human development, as well as some diseases, including cancer -- is the goal of researchers who meet each year at the Woods Hole, Mass., facility.
"If you can imagine identical twin sisters at rest, their breath drawing them subtly together and apart, who somehow latch onto ropes that pull them to opposite sides of the bed, you can imagine what happens to a chromosome in the dividing cell," the scientists said.
The researchers describe newly discovered interactions between sister kinetochores -- the protein bundles at the contact point between the two identical strands of a chromosome -- and microtubules, the "ropes" that attach to the kinetochores to pull the strands apart.
The work by scientists from the University of Dundee in Scotland, the Harvard Medical School, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Britain's Marie Curie Research Institute -- a group known as the MBL Kinetochore Consortium -- appears in The Journal of Cell Biology.
