Photo: Bryan Goodchild and Rob Carlin
An international team of researchers co-led by Job Dekker, PhD, at UMass Chan Medical School, have identified rules that tell cells how to fold DNA into the tightly packed, iconic X-shaped chromosomes formed during mitosis that help ensure the accurate passing of genetic information between cells during cell division.
Published in the journal Science, these findings illuminate basic biological functions underlying mitosis on a micrometer scale. Understanding how the cells accomplish this critical task may provide important new insights into inheritance and DNA stability and repair, as well as genetic mutations that lead to human diseases such as cancer.
“While we and many…