by Keisuke Ishihara
Microtubule asters, which are built every time the cell prepares to divide, help the cell find its center. In this video abstract, Keisuke Ishihara tells you what he has learned about how these structures grow. Hint: it's like a relay race! You can read the full paper in the journal eLife.
Keisuke carried out this work as a graduate student in the lab of Tim Mitchison at Harvard, collaborating with Kirill Korolev at Boston University.
Keisuke is now a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany.
Related resources
You can watch 3 related lectures from Prof. Tim Mitchison! On iBiology.org, watch him discuss Self-Organization in Biology in the following two videos:
And watch Tim deliver a lecture on "Spatial organization of a very large cell by microtubules" at the King's International Lecture Series.