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Cleavage-furrow formation without F-actin in Chlamydomonas

Masayuki Onishi, James G. Umen, Frederick R. Cross, John R. Pringle
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/789016
Masayuki Onishi
aDepartment of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305
bDepartment of Biology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708
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  • For correspondence: onishi@stanford.edu jpringle@stanford.edu
James G. Umen
cDonald Danforth Plant Science Center, St. Louis, MO 63132
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Frederick R. Cross
dThe Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10065
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John R. Pringle
aDepartment of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305
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  • For correspondence: onishi@stanford.edu jpringle@stanford.edu
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Abstract

It is widely believed that cleavage-furrow formation during cell division is driven by the contraction of a ring containing F-actin and type-II myosin. However, even in cells that have such rings, they are not always essential for furrow formation. Moreover, many taxonomically diverse eukaryotic cells divide by furrowing but have no type-II myosin, making it unlikely that an actomyosin ring drives furrowing. To explore this issue further, we have used one such organism, the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. We found that although F-actin is concentrated in the furrow region, none of the three myosins (of types VIII and XI) is localized there. Moreover, when F-actin was eliminated through a combination of a mutation and a drug, furrows still formed and the cells divided, although somewhat less efficiently than normal. Unexpectedly, division of the large Chlamydomonas chloroplast was delayed in the cells lacking F-actin; as this organelle lies directly in the path of the cleavage furrow, this delay may explain, at least in part, the delay in cell division itself. Earlier studies had shown an association of microtubules with the cleavage furrow, and we used a fluorescently tagged EB1 protein to show that at least the microtubule plus-ends are still associated with the furrows in the absence of F-actin, consistent with the possibility that the microtubules are important for furrow formation. We suggest that the actomyosin ring evolved as one way to improve the efficiency of a core process for furrow formation that was already present in ancestral eukaryotes.

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Posted October 01, 2019.
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Cleavage-furrow formation without F-actin in Chlamydomonas
Masayuki Onishi, James G. Umen, Frederick R. Cross, John R. Pringle
bioRxiv 789016; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/789016
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Cleavage-furrow formation without F-actin in Chlamydomonas
Masayuki Onishi, James G. Umen, Frederick R. Cross, John R. Pringle
bioRxiv 789016; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/789016

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