Commentary: Rab GTPase: A New Mitotic Delivery Service

摘要

Mitosis is a crucial event that controls the equal partitioning of the genetic information between the two daughter cells.Failure in this process can cause various human genetic diseases and can contribute to cancer onset and development.For many years cell division studies focused on the identi?cation and analysis of the mechanisms and signaling pathways that control microtubule dynamics and chromosome behavior, however in recent years other important cellular and regulatoryprocesseshavebeenimplicatedinvariousaspectsofcelldivisionandourtraditionalview of mitosishaschanged.In particularseveralstudies havehighlightedtheimportanceof membranes (Civelekoglu-Scholey et al., 2010; Poirier et al., 2010; Zheng, 2010; Schweizer et al., 2014) and membranetra?ckingproteins(Royleetal.,2005;LiuandZheng,2009)duringmitosisandrevealed that many proteins known for their function in membrane tra?cking in interphase have also a role during the mitotic process.In 2011 two papers reported a new role for the small GTPase Rab5 during mitosis and that this new function had been conserved through evolution (Capalbo et al., 2011; Serio et al., 2011).These papers found an unexpected new regulatory role for Rab5 GTPase in mitotic progression and regulation of membrane dynamics during nuclear envelope breakdown both in Drosophila melanogaster and human cells.They also reported that Rab5 is required for the correct alignment of chromosomes at the metaphase plate, an important step for the proper segregation of chromosomes.