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.

Posted
AuthorJan Skotheim

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.

Posted
AuthorJan Skotheim

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4680914/ in Scientific Reports. I think this represents some concrete molecular progress on the question of how bacteria link growth, replication and division. This was made possible by live-cell imaging of DNA replication so that the various periods of the cell cycle could be imaged and correlations with size and growth quantified. I'm looking forward to seeing the bacterial size control field move beyond the phenomenology of the past two years and get into some molecular mechanisms as we have for budding yeast. How this completely different control system evolved to couple growth and division will form an interesting point of comparison with the eukaryotic system. Onwards!

Posted
AuthorJan Skotheim