How the sea urchin embryo gets its cleavage furrows (in the right place)
How the sea urchin embryo gets its cleavage furrows (in the right place)
Garrett M. Odell and Victoria E. Foe
University of Washington
When animal cells divide, they assemble a transient, single-use, ring-shaped muscle called the 'contractile ring' so that, when it contracts, it cleaves the parent cell into two daughter cells. Only if the resulting cleavage plane is oriented just right does each daughter cell inherit identical sets of chromosomes and other essential bits. In this talk, Victoria Foe and Garrett Odell give their new solution to the long-standing mystery of how cells 'know' where and when to position their contractile rings. This involves a dynamic self-assembling cooperation of amazing cell biological machinery, including tens of thousands of single-molecule motors running along thousands of microtubules. The talk comprises a sequence of pictures and movies (of real cell micrographs and computer simulations) that border on art, plus a scientific narration explaining the biological mystery and how the proposed solution solves it.
