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Published online March 5, 2007
doi:10.1083/jcb.200610043
The Journal of Cell Biology, Vol. 176, No. 6, 765-770
The Rockefeller University Press, 0021-9525 $30.00
© 2007 Brown et al.
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Xenopus tropicalis egg extracts provide insight into scaling of the mitotic spindle



Katherine S. Brown1, Michael D. Blower1, Thomas J. Maresca1, Timothy C. Grammer2, Richard M. Harland2, and Rebecca Heald1

1 Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and 2 Center for Integrative Genomics, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720

Correspondence to Rebecca Heald: heald{at}socrates.berkeley.edu

The African clawed frog Xenopus laevis has been instrumental to investigations of both development and cell biology, but the utility of this model organism for genetic and proteomic studies is limited by its long generation time and unsequenced pseudotetraploid genome. Xenopus tropicalis, which is a small, faster-breeding relative of X. laevis, has recently been adopted for research in developmental genetics and functional genomics, and has been chosen for genome sequencing. We show that X. tropicalis egg extracts reconstitute the fundamental cell cycle events of nuclear formation and bipolar spindle assembly around exogenously added sperm nuclei. Interestingly, X. tropicalis spindles were ~30% shorter than X. laevis spindles, and mixing experiments revealed a dynamic, dose-dependent regulation of spindle size by cytoplasmic factors. Measurements of microtubule dynamics revealed that microtubules polymerized slower in X. tropicalis extracts compared to X. laevis, but that this difference is unlikely to account for differences in spindle size. Thus, in addition to expanding the range of developmental and cell biological experiments, the use of X. tropicalis provides novel insight into the complex mechanisms that govern spindle morphogenesis.

K.S. Brown, M.D. Blower, and T.J. Maresca contributed equally to this paper.

M.D. Blower's present address is Dept. of Molecular Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114.

Abbreviations used in this paper: CSF, cytostatic factor; HCG, human chori-onic gonadotropin; NuMA, nuclear mitotic apparatus protein; Xnf7, Xenopus nuclear factor 7.


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