Stem cells can self-renew and generate differentiating daughter cells. It is not known whether these cells maintain their epigenetic information during asymmetric division. Using a dual-color method to differentially label "old" versus "new" histones in Drosophila male germline stem cells (GSCs), we show that preexisting canonical H3, but not variant H3.3, histones are selectively segregated to...

PAR proteins (partitioning defective) are major regulators of cell polarity and asymmetric cell division. One of the par genes, par-1, encodes a Ser/Thr kinase that is conserved from yeast to mammals. In Caenorhabditis elegans, par-1 governs asymmetric cell division by ensuring the polar distribution of cell fate determinants. However the precise mechanisms by which PAR-1 regulates asymmetric c...

During gravitropism, the directional signal of gravity is perceived by gravity-sensing cells called statocytes, leading to asymmetric distribution of auxin in the responding organs. To identify the genes involved in gravity signaling in statocytes, we performed transcriptome analyses of statocyte-deficient Arabidopsis thaliana mutants and found two candidates from the LAZY1 family, AtLAZY1/LAZY...

For many discriminative classifiers, it is desirable to convert an unnormalized confidence score output from the classifier to a normalized probability estimate. Such a method can also be used for creating better estimates from a probabilistic classifier that outputs poor estimates. Typical parametric methods have an underlying assumption that the score distribution for a class is symmetric; we...

Chromosome separation and segregation must be executed within a bacterial cell in which the membrane and cytoplasm are highly structured. Here, we develop a strand-specific model based on each of the future daughter chromosomes being associated with a different set of structures or hyperstructures in an asymmetric cell. The essence of the segregation mechanism is that the genes on the same stra...

Chromosome alignment in the middle of the bipolar spindle is a hallmark of metazoan cell divisions. When we offset the metaphase plate position by creating an asymmetric centriole distribution on each pole, we find that metaphase plates relocate to the middle of the spindle before anaphase. The spindle assembly checkpoint enables this centering mechanism by providing cells enough time to correc...