The Hehnly Lab recently got to help with a story from Dylan Burnette's laboratory that came out in Scientific Reports. Check it out here. It is filled with beautiful microscopy and looks at the relationship between how a dividing cell communicates with an extracellular matrix, and its affect on cleavage furrow morphology, and spindle orientation.
Human Nek7-interactor RGS2 is required for mitotic spindle organization.
Congrats to Edmarcia Elisa de Souza and all the affiliated authors at the University of Campinas, Brazil, on their accepted story entitled "Human Nek7-interactor RGS2 is required for mitotic spindle organization." It was fun to have the chance to work with Edmarcia while we were in the Doxsey Lab on this. Jorg Kobarg's group found that a cell cycle related kinase, Nek7, through its interaction with a regulator of G-protein signaling, RGS2, has an exciting new implication in spindle orientation and spindle pole maturation. Check it out! It's currently in press, but you can find a link to it through pub med or through Cell Cycle below:
From Figure 6 of Edmarcia's paper where she illustrates nicely the loss of RGS2 causing a mitotic delay, failure, or asymmetric flattening of the two daughter cells (A). We believe spindle misorientation that occurs during metaphase is contributing to the asymmetric flattening of the two daughter cells (B-C).