Paul Nurse / Jacqueline Hayles : Cell Cycle

Goals

Our laboratory is investigating problems of the cell cycle and cell shape using the genetically amenable model organism fission yeast. Our main interests are 1) Understanding the molecular mechanisms that regulate cell size and the rate of progress through the cell cycle, using screens to identify(i) small cell mutants and (ii) to identify genes products whose level is particularly important for cell cycle progression. 2) Regulation of the CDK1 complex during the cell cycle. Many biological pathways contain redundancy, this leads to complexity which can make investigation of underlying mechanisms difficult. To overcome this problem we have constructed a simplified CDK1 pathway in fission yeast, which reduces the level of complexity and facilitates further investigation. This type of approach may be used to study many different complex processes. 3) The molecular mechanisms that determine the overall shape of the fission yeast cell and cell organelles such as the nucleus and 4) How cell growth is regulated during the meiotic and mitotic cell cycles. To facilitate these studies we have identified near genome wide sets of genes required for the cell cycle or cell shape. Many of the genes we are investigating are conserved in humans and these studies in fission yeast may lead to new insights into the human cell cycle, cell shape and organelle shape processes and lead to new areas of research that may be directly relevant to cancer.