Submitted by Christine Alexander on Mon, 12/10/2015 - 12:16
This week in Nature Communications - A new Open Access paper from members of the Carazo Salas Group: Wall mechanics and exocytosis define the shape of growth domains in fission yeast.
"Cell shape is determined by a combination of biochemical regulation and mechanical forces. How mechanics and biochemistry generate specifically-shaped cellular domains is not fully understood. In this paper, we image the dynamic behaviour of growth regulatory proteins in fission yeast and incorporate these molecular data within a mechanical model of cell wall growth.
We show that exocytosis plays a dominant role in shaping cell growth domains and that cell wall mechanics and exocytic pattern suffice to account for growth domain morphogenesis throughout the entire cell cycle in this species" [Rafael Carazo Salas]
Above and on the home page: Time-lapse image sequence of a growing fission yeast cell expressing the exocytically-delivered reporter of glucan synthesis Bgs4-GFP (green) and whose wall was decorated with fluorescent quantum dots (red). Quantum dots can be seen splaying out as the cell wall expands at the polar areas of active cell growth.