continued from Thoughts are not of material matter
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Open AccessReview
Spatial and Temporal Scaling of Microtubules and Mitotic Spindles
settings
Open AccessReview
Spatial and Temporal Scaling of Microtubules and Mitotic Spindles
1 Centre de Recherche de Biologie Cellulaire de Montpellier (CRBM), CNRS UMR 5237, Université de Montpellier, 1919 Route de Mende, CEDEX 5, 34293 Montpellier, France
2 Université de Paris, CNRS, Institut Jacques Monod, F-75013 Paris, France
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Vladimir Joukov
Cells 2022, 11(2), 248; Cells | Free Full-Text | Spatial and Temporal Scaling of Microtubules and Mitotic Spindles
Received: 23 December 2021 / Revised: 7 January 2022 / Accepted: 9 January 2022 / Published: 12 January 2022
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cytoskeleton Dynamics during Cell Division)
Abstract
During cell division, the mitotic spindle, a macromolecular structure primarily comprised of microtubules, drives chromosome alignment and partitioning between daughter cells.
Keywords: mitotic spindle; allometry; temporal scaling; spatial scaling; microtubule dynamics; embryonic development
1. Introduction
Metazoan development relies on biological processes that occur at very different scales, ranging from molecules to organisms, and that must be coordinated in space and time. During early embryogenesis, a succession of rapid cell divisions (embryonic cleavages) occurs in the absence of growth, leading to a dramatic reduction in cell size.
How cellular processes are coordinated and remain accurate along with the progressive reduction of cell size is a fascinating question in biology. The remarkable capacity of a variety of cellular organelles to adapt their size, number or mass to the overall cell size has been the subject of many studies.
Among the organelles that adapt, or scale, their size to cellular dimensions, the mitotic spindle has gathered the interest of many scientists from different disciplines for its key role in genome partitioning and its remarkable self-organizing properties.
The mitotic spindle is a conserved dynamic macromolecular structure composed of microtubules essential for the alignment and segregation of chromosomes during cell division [1]
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