An international team led by Iva Tolić of the Ruđer Bošković Institute and Nenad Pavin of the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Science has found a universal principle governing the mitotic spindle, the structure that separates chromosomes when a cell divides. The work was published in Nature Cell Biology and announced on 14 October.
Comparing 25 evolutionarily distant species, the scientists found that the more genetic material a cell has, the wider the zone where chromosomes are arranged before separation. What matters is the total amount of DNA, not the number of chromosomes: crowded chromosomes push outwards and help open up space. A physical model predicted the effect and experiments in living cells confirmed it.
The finding may help explain how genome size changes during evolution and how cancer cells tolerate changes in their DNA. It is the outcome of the ANEUPLOIDY project, funded with €10 million by the European Research Council – the first Synergy Grant awarded to researchers in Croatia, which produced 41 scientific papers in six years.
