Newly Discovered Mechanism in Cell Division has Implications for Understanding Aberrant Chromosome's Role in Cancer, According to Penn Study

Penn Medicine News Release

PHILADELPHIA – “A biologist, a physicist, and a nanotechnologist walk into a ...” sounds like the start of a joke. Instead, it was the start of a collaboration that has helped to decipher a critical, but so far largely unstudied, phase of how cells divide. Errors in cell division can cause mutations that lead to cancer, and this study could shed light on the role of chromosome abnormalities in uncontrolled cell replication.

The biologist in question is University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Associate Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology, Phong Tran, PhD. With physicist Francois Nedelec of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and Guilhem Velve-Casquillas, PhD, a postdoc in Tran's lab who helped develop a device requiring nano-scale technology used in the study, Tran uncovered the molecular players and mechanism underlying a little-studied stage of cellular division called Anaphase B... Read More