New light shed on cell division
Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - 16:30
in Biology & Nature
Genes control everything from eye color to disease susceptibility, and inheritance - the passing of the genes from generation to generation after they have been duplicated - depends on centromeres. Located in the little pinched waist of each chromosome, centromeres control the movements that separate sister chromosomes when cells divide ensuring that each daughter cell inherits a complete copy of each chromosome. It has long been known that centromeres are not formed solely from DNA; rather, centromere proteins (CENPs) facilitate the assembly of a centromere on each chromosome. Understanding how a protein structure can be copied with enough precision to be stable, generation after generation, has been a mystery.