a Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology , National Taiwan University , Taipei , Taiwan.
b Department of Mechanical Engineering , Stanford University , Stanford , CA , USA.
Cell Cycle. 2019 Aug;18(15):1671-1675. doi: 10.1080/15384101.2019.1632137. Epub 2019 Jun 24.
The mitotic spindle has long been known to play a crucial role in mitosis, orchestrating the segregation of chromosomes into two daughter cells during mitosis with high fidelity. Intracellular forces generated by the mitotic spindle are increasingly well understood, and recent work has revealed that the efficiency and the accuracy of mitosis is ensured by the scaling of mitotic spindle size with cell size. However, the role of the spindle in cancer progression has largely been ignored. Two recent studies point toward the role of mitotic spindle evolution in cancer progression through extracellular force generation. Cancer cells with lengthened spindles exhibit highly increased metastatic potential. Further, interpolar spindle elongation drives protrusive extracellular force generation along the mitotic axis to allow mitotic elongation, a morphological change that is required for cell division. Together, these findings open a new research area studying the role of the mitotic spindle evolution in cancer metastasis.
有丝分裂纺锤体长期以来一直被认为在有丝分裂中起着至关重要的作用，它在有丝分裂中将染色体精确地分配到两个子细胞中。有丝分裂纺锤体产生的细胞内力越来越被人们所理解，最近的研究表明，有丝分裂纺锤体大小与细胞大小的比例保证了有丝分裂的效率和准确性。然而，纺锤体在癌症进展中的作用在很大程度上被忽视了。最近的两项研究指出，有丝分裂纺锤体的进化在通过细胞外力的产生在癌症进展中起着重要作用。纺锤体拉长的癌细胞表现出高度增加的转移潜力。此外，两极纺锤体的伸长驱动沿有丝分裂轴产生突出的细胞外力，以允许有丝分裂伸长，这是细胞分裂所必需的形态变化。总之，这些发现开辟了一个新的研究领域，研究有丝分裂纺锤体进化在癌症转移中的作用。
