Perfect Imbalance

The symmetry of a butterfly’s wings has an undeniable beauty, but under the surface life relies on processes with a more nuanced balance. When stem cells, precursor cells essential for maintenance and repair, are needed they go through asymmetric division to multiply and develop. This could risk genetic errors, so the process is rigorously regulated. Stem cells are polarised along a particular axis during this, and the orientation of the molecular machinery prevents runaway cell division and tumour formation. To understand what links polarisation to division, researchers examined asymmetrically dividing stem cells in the fruit fly (blue in the larva brain pictured). They found that a protein called Polo kinase regulates the duration of cell division, and the activation of this was in turn regulated by elements called Aurora A and B. This activation is key to maintaining the polarisation, allowing tissue maintenance while preventing the formation of harmful tumours.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image by Emmanuel Gallaud (image analysis) and Régis Giet (data acquisition)
• From work by Emmanuel Gallaud et al, Univ Rennes, CNRS, INSERM, IGDR (Institut de Génétique et Développement de Rennes) Rennes, France
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in PLOS Genetics, April 2022