The Josef Steiner Lecture:CDKs and cell-cycle control in fission yeast: Relevance to other eukaryotes and cancer
✍ Scribed by Paul Nurse
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- French
- Weight
- 24 KB
- Volume
- 71
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0020-7136
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
There are two reasons why cell-cycle control is important for understanding cancer. The first and obvious one is that cancer involves unrestrained cell proliferation resulting in cells losing control and being driven through the cell cycle. The second reason is that cell-cycle control leads to an orderly progression through the cell cycle. As a consequence, S-phase always precedes mitosis and mitosis always precedes the S-phase of the next cell cycle, resulting in only one S-phase occurring each cycle. These checkpoint controls ensure that the genome remains stable and that each newly dividing cell receives a full and normal complement of chromosomes. Often when cancer develops there is considerable genome instability, which could occur as a consequence of disturbing these cell-cycle controls.
Key components controlling the cell cycle are the cyclin-dependent kinases or CDKs (Nurse, 1990). This class of protein kinase consists of a 34-kDa catalytic sub-unit complexed with a cyclin; the latter is necessary for the complex to have enzymatic activity. The fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe has been useful for elucidating the role of CDKs in cell-cycle control, and much of what has been learnt about these controls in simple organisms such as yeast has turned out to be applicable to the Metazoa, including human beings (Lee and Nurse, 1987). In this lecture I shall briefly summarise what is known about the role of fission yeast CDKs in controlling the onset of S-phase and mitosis, and in ensuring that these events occur in the correct sequence during the cell cycle, focussing on work from my own laboratory.