Experiments decipher key piece of the ‘histone code’ in cell division
Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - 17:21
in Biology & Nature
Reproduce or perish. That's the bottom line for genes. Because nothing lives forever, reproduction is how life sustains itself, and it happens most fundamentally in the division and replication of the cell, known as mitosis. Now new research has detailed a key role in mitosis for a chemical modification to histone proteins that package lengthy strings of DNA into compact chromosomes. The experiments, recently published in Science, add to an increasingly intricate picture of the precisely timed events that separate new copies of chromosomes to opposite ends of a cell just before the cell divides, one of the most fundamental processes involved in the reproduction of life.
