Protein motors may drive cells on route to specialization
Roush, W.
Science 271(5255): 1498-1499
1996
ISSN/ISBN: 0036-8075 PMID: 8599101 Document Number: 455679
By examining the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, researchers are beginning to uncover the process by which parent cells divide to create daughter cells with new abilities. In the March 8, 1996, issue of Cell, two teams of researchers, working separately at the University of California, San Francisco, and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria, report details of the role played by a cellular railway running between mother and daughter in endowing daughter cells with different abilities. It is thought that motor proteins shuttle in an unknown regulatory factor along cytoskeletal "railway tracks" and, working through a recently discovered protein called Ash1p, prevent mating-type switching.