Progress in Cell Cycle Research: Volume 4

Edited by:
  • L. Meijer,
  • A. Jézéquel &
  • B. Ducommun
Kluwer Academic/Plenum · January 2000 Hardback £83/$105

All living organisms are made up of cells that have been generated by division of pre-existing cells. Our bodies, like those of all existing organisms, are merely the carriers and descendants of germ cells. Knowing the molecular mechanisms that ensure orderly cell division should help us not only to understand how all living creatures are generated, but will also increase our understanding of the uncontrolled cell divisions of cancers, thereby aiding our search for effective strategies to combat this terrible disease.

Over a decade ago, we witnessed the 'cyclin revolution'. A symbiosis between yeast and fly genetics and clam, starfish, frog and mammalian tissue-culture biochemistry rapidly gave rise to the currently upheld idea that DNA replication — and mitosis — are induced by the activation of S- and M-phase-specific cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs). Hence, CDKs emerged as the universal master regulators of the cell cycle. Although this revolution occurred in several different laboratories, in 1988 a cell-cycle meeting was held in a small marine biology station in Roscoff, France, and this was the place where the most important changes in this field were announced.

Progress in Cell Cycle Research is also a product made in Roscoff. This is the fourth volume in a series of books that review different aspects of the cell cycle. The editors have made a special effort to select topics that fall outside the main stream of cell-cycle research, avoiding areas that have been extensively reviewed in other specialized review journals. Therefore, if you wish to read about the regulation of DNA replication and segregation checkpoints (the molecular mechanisms that ensure the correct succession of cell-cycle events), or the role of proteolysis in the control of the cell cycle, this is not the book you are looking for. You can, however, find interesting reviews on less studied aspects. For instance, the book deals with how extracellular signals stimulate cells to grow and how growing cells are forced to divide, the regulation of cell anchorage during cell division, the mechanisms of oocyte maturation, and the role of phosphorylation-dependent prolyl isomerases on CDK substrates as a new cell-cycle regulatory mechanism. One particularly useful chapter is dedicated to the continuum model of the cell cycle. This model proposes that initiation of DNA replication is the product of a cumulative process that occurs throughout the cell cycle, and that it is not due to a process that is specifically associated with G1 phase. Many classic experiments are re-interpreted on the basis of this different view. I suspect that this review will be especially illuminating for those working on tissue-culture cells, in which there has been some confusion between signals that regulate cell growth (like the ones generated by Ras or Myc) and those that regulate the cell cycle.

The book ends on a different note — the final chapters are more exotic and address issues that are still in their infancy, such as the cell cycle in protozoan parasites — eukaryotic microorganisms that cause devastating diseases in developing countries. Differences between the cell cycles of parasites and hosts should lead to the identification of cell-cycle events that are unique to a given parasite, and which may present new targets for antiparasitic chemotherapy. For example, trypanosomes that cause Chagas' disease in South America or sleeping sickness in Africa lack the checkpoint that prevents cytokinesis before the completion of mitosis. Plasmodium, the agent that causes malaria, lacks the checkpoint pathways that prevent mitosis in response to DNA damage or spindle assembly. In the future, systematic sequencing of the genomes of several species, combined with reverse genetics, will allow researchers to speed up the functional analysis of candidate cell-cycle genes. In summary, there is no doubt that fascinating discoveries in this area of research are just over the horizon.

Two chapters address circadian control of cell proliferation. We are all influenced by 24-hour light–dark cycles, and this 'circadian rhythm' seems to influence when cells divide during the day. These studies may be important for determining the best time of the day for anti-cancer treatment to have minimum impact on normal cells. Finally, a chapter on the development of new anticancer drugs and another on the rather speculative hypothesis that neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease can be viewed as neurones re-entering the cell cycle are also worth reading.

This book is in general clearly written. Unfortunately for an area of research that is moving so fast, the references are a bit out of date, as there are no references for 1999 and 2000 and the figures and photographs (all in black and white) are of varying quality. For this latter reason, I do not expect this book to be of great use to teachers preparing undergraduate courses. It is probably more appropriate for researchers working on the cell cycle or related problems who wish to learn more about aspects of cell division that hitherto have not been studied in so much depth.