our paper on how the cyclin dependent kinase directly regulates cell metabolism is out in Molecular Cell

Jenny's paper is out!

Jenny shows how the major cell cycle kinase Cdk1 directly activates Nth1 to reroute carbon fluxes to promote completion of the cell cycle. Nth1 is important for utilizing carbon stored in the storage carbohydrate pool. Mobilizing this extra pool of building block can be essential when yeast are growing in poor environments. We were initially motivated to do this work from Bruce Futcher's beautiful essay on the finishing kick to Start. It turns out there is a finishing kick, but it isn't to the start of the cell cycle, but rather to push on through to the end. More broadly, this work shows how the oscillation of Cdk1 activity can directly entrain fluxes in central carbon metabolism to meet the temporally specific biosynthetic demands of the cell cycle. A similar conclusion was also reached by Bruce Futcher's group so see there paper out in the same Mol Cell issue as well. Here is a link to our paper

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1097276516001283

our paper on cell cycle evolution with the Buchler lab is out in eLife!

How can evolution change something as essential as the cell division cycle that is responsible for controlling the division of one cell into two? This is simple a function that cells can't just not have for a while. But, clearly things changed, and they changed especially drastically in the transition to the fungal lineage where the G1/S control system is dominated by components not found in animals, plants or protists. Edgar Medina and Nick Buchler found that the transition to fungi was particularly interesting, as the basal fungi retained the animal components, Rb and E2F, but also maintain the newer fungal system of Whi5 and SBF. This is the first evidence for a hybrid intermediate network, in which both systems could provide for some redundant functions and thereby facilitate more drastic evolution in this essential network. But, then, where did the newer fungal components come from? We guess viruses. For more speculation, and all the data, read the paper in eLife!

https://elifesciences.org/content/5/e09492

cell size to kinetochore ratio sets the activation of the spindle assembly checkpoint during development (Galli and Morgan Dev Cell)

A very nice paper just came out in Developmental Cell by Galli and Morgan. The show that the activation of the spindle assembly checkpoint during work development is controlled by the kinetochore-to-cell size ration. Basically, during early development, cells divide without growth to increase the ratio. There are some very nice manipulations in this paper that really help to solidify a long-standing hypothesis (that i've been aware about in the frog literature) about how the spindle checkpoint is activated during development.

the turkish government should stop prosecuting academics! see our correspondence to Nature

here is the full text, written by Caghan Kizil found at the link click here

We strongly urge the Turkish government to stop prosecuting academics, to abide by international human-rights values and to respect civil liberties — including freedom of speech (see Nature http://doi.org/bbxj; 2016).

In a petition to the government this month, more than 2,000 academics from Turkey and thousands of international scholars have called for an end to the curfews and violence against people in Kurdish provinces. This prompted Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to order the Higher Education Board to take action against those academics he described as committing “treason”. Istanbul's Chief Public Prosecutor launched a criminal investigation based on Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which prosecutes those who insult the state.

We are deeply concerned about this escalating crisis. We hope that the international academic community will join us in condemning these attacks against our colleagues in Turkey.

And signatories

Caghan Kizil German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE),
Helmholtz Association, Dresden, Germany.
caghan.kizil@crt-dresden.de
Bruce Alberts University of California, San Francisco, USA.
Pinar Ayata Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at
Mount Sinai, New York, USA.
Günter Blobel Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Rockefeller
University, New York, USA.
Mario Capecchi University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA.
Mary Marshall Clark Columbia Center for Oral History Research,
Columbia University, New York, USA.
Robert Curl Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA.
Winrich A. Freiwald The Rockefeller University, New York, USA.
Roald Hoffmann Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.
Daniel Mucida The Rockefeller University, New York, USA.
Eric J. Nestler Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at
Mount Sinai, New York, USA.
Jan M. Skotheim Stanford University, California, USA.
Alain Trautmann Cochin Institute, Inserm, CNRS UMR, Paris,
France.
Harald zur Hausen German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ),
Heidelberg, Germany.
Emrah Altindis Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School,
Boston, USA.