The Min system regulates the positioning of the cell division site in many bacteria. In Escherichia coli, MinD migrates rapidly from one cell pole to the other. In conjunction with MinC, MinD helps to prevent unwanted FtsZ rings from assembling at the poles and to stabilize their positioning at midcell. Using time-lapse microscopy of growing and dividing cells expressing a gfp-minD fusion, we s...

Multicellular animals have evolved conserved signaling pathways that translate cell polarity cues into mitotic spindle positioning to control the orientation of cell division within complex tissue structures. These oriented cell divisions are essential for the development of cell diversity and the maintenance of tissue homeostasis. Despite intense efforts, the molecular mechanisms that control ...

An intriguing feature of centrioles is that these highly complicated microtubule-based structures duplicate once per cell cycle, affording the cell precise control over their number. Each cell contains exactly two centrioles, linked together as a pair, one of which is a mother centriole formed in a previous cell cycle and the other of which is a daughter centriole whose assembly is templated by...

Motility is a hallmark of life. Even cells that are incapable of active movement within their environment perform essential intracellular motility processes. A number of mechanisms have evolved to generate the mechanical forces required to drive biological motility. A particularly successful and ubiquitous mechanism of biological force production utilizes mechanochemical enzymes, or ‘‘motor pro...

Accurate positioning of vehicles plays an important role in autonomous driving. In our previous research on landmark-based positioning, poles were extracted both from reference data and online sensor data, which were then matched to improve the positioning accuracy of the vehicles. However, there are environments which contain only a limited number of poles. 3D feature points are one of the pro...

UNLABELLED It has recently been demonstrated that bacterial chromosomes are highly organized, with specific positioning of the replication initiation region. Moreover, the positioning of the replication machinery (replisome) has been shown to be variable and dependent on species-specific cell cycle features. Here, we analyzed replisome positions in Mycobacterium smegmatis, a slow-growing bacter...

In budding yeast, cells lacking separase function exit mitosis with an undivided nucleus localized to the daughter cell. Here we show that the inability to separate sister chromatids per se is not sufficient to cause the daughter preference. Rather, separase affects nuclear positioning as part of the Cdc14 early anaphase release (FEAR) pathway. The role of the FEAR pathway in nuclear positionin...

Proper chromosome segregation is of paramount importance for proper genetic inheritance. Defects in chromosome segregation can lead to aneuploidy, which is a hallmark of cancer cells. Eukaryotic chromosome segregation is accomplished by the bipolar spindle. Additional mechanisms, such as the spindle assembly checkpoint and centromere positioning, further help to ensure complete segregation fide...

Bacteria ensure the fidelity of genetic inheritance by the coordinated control of chromosome segregation and cell division. Here, we review the molecules and mechanisms that govern the correct subcellular positioning and rapid separation of newly replicated chromosomes and plasmids towards the cell poles and, significantly, the emergence of mitotic-like machineries capable of segregating plasmi...

Chemotaxis receptors and associated signalling proteins in Escherichia coli form clusters that consist of thousands of molecules and are the largest native protein complexes described to date in bacteria. Clusters are located at the cell poles and laterally along the cell body, and play an important role in signal transduction. Much work has been done to study the structure and function of rece...