Institute seminar February 3rd 10.30 Erik Boye

Cell-cycle control in eukaryotes

Introduction

My ambition in this talk is to explain the problems that our group is working with right now. To achieve that I need to give you a short introduction with some history and then go through current projects and introduce the people who run them.

Our starting point was an investigation of G1/S, since this transition is almost always abnormal in cancer cells. A loss of the G1/S checkpoint functions appears to be almost mandatory for the development of cancer. We have used fission yeast (S. pombe) as our model organism. Somewhat unexpectedly, we discovered a novel checkpoint mechanism that is dependent upon the kinase Gcn2. This kinase was until now only known to regulate translation under stress. In our continued investigations of this checkpoint we came across novel findings that have lead us in several different directions, such as checkpoints in human cells, the regulation of both transcription and translation, the detection of novel noncoding RNAs, the phosphorylation of the translational regulator eIF2α, etc. We are determined to identify the mechanism of checkpoint induction and the target(s) of Gcn2 when it stops cell-cycle progression. In my presentation I shall present most, but not all, of the spin-off projects.

References:
Krohn et al. (2008) The G1-S checkpoint in fission yeast is not a general DNA damage checkpoint. J Cell Sci, 121:4047-4054.
Grallert and Boye (2007) The Gcn2 kinase as a cell cycle regulator. Cell Cycle 6:2768-72
Tvegård et al.(2007) A novel checkpoint mechanism regulating the G1/S transition. Genes Dev. 21:649-654
Nilssen et al. (2003) Intra-G1 arrest in response to UV irradiation in fission yeast. PNAS. 100:10758-10763