Here we show how the adder phenomenon in budding yeast emerges, almost as an accident perhaps, from distinct regulation in G1 and S/G2/M phases of the cell cycle. This reconciles the adder hullabaloo with what we have previously been examining in terms of how growth triggers division at the G1/S transition.
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(17)31024-2
Along with founding members, Jessica Feldman, Tim Stearns, Martha Cyert, Scott Dixon and Ron Kopito, we established the Stanford Center for Cell Biology to organize research in the area. We have a website and it is here:
http://cellbiology.stanford.edu/
This is exciting, and I hope it will build on the current social nucleus we have to catalyze an even more dynamic and exciting environment for cell biology at Stanford.
We reviewed the literature of how the genome is activated following fertilization in vertebrates. Dave Jukam, with an assist from Ali Shariati and myself, did some heroic work pulling together the literature from frog, fish, mouse and human. Usually the model organisms frog and fish are considered separately from mammals. But, we were able to pull it together in what I think is a useful way. This was by far the most difficult review I have been a part of writing and it took over a year to put it together in a compact readable form. I'm proud of it and hope some ideas, like the use of various nuclear-to-cytoplasmic ratios to control events in early development, inspire future work revealing conserved principles of early development.
Paper is available here. According to the significance statement, which we recently wrote: In metazoans, topological domains are regions in the genome that more frequently associate with themselves than with neighboring regions. These domains are important for regulating transcription and replication. However, topological domains were thought to be absent in budding yeast. Thus, we did not know the degree of conservation of topological organization and its associated functions. Herein, we describe the existence of topologically associating domains in budding yeast and show that these domains regulate replication timing so that origins within a domain fire synchronously. Our work showing conservation in budding yeast sets the stage to use yeast genetics to interrogate the molecular basis of the topological domains defining genome architecture.
