Abstract
All organisms, from bacteria to humans, face the daunting task of replicating, packaging and segregating up to two metres (about 6 × 109 base pairs) of DNA when each cell divides. This task is carried out up to a trillion times during the development of a human from a single fertilized cell. The strategy by which DNA is replicated is now well understood. But when it comes to packaging and segregating a genome, the mechanisms are only beginning to be understood and are often as variable as the organisms in which they are studied.
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Acknowledgements
We thank E. Yeh, J. Haase and J. Verdaasdonk (Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) for comments on the manuscript, and L. Vicci and R. M. Taylor III (Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and M. Rubinstein (Department of Chemistry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) for discussions concerning the mechanical properties of biological molecules.
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Correspondence should be addressed to K.B. (kerry_bloom@unc.edu).
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Bloom, K., Joglekar, A. Towards building a chromosome segregation machine. Nature 463, 446–456 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08912
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08912
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