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A Journey through Time on the Discovery of Cell Cycle Regulation

All living organisms on Earth are made up of cells, which are the functional unit of life. Eukaryotic organisms can consist of a single cell (unicellular) or a group of either identical or different cells (multicellular). Biologists have always been fascinated by how a single cell, such as an egg, c...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Uzbekov, Rustem, Prigent, Claude
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8870340/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35203358
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/cells11040704
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author Uzbekov, Rustem
Prigent, Claude
author_facet Uzbekov, Rustem
Prigent, Claude
author_sort Uzbekov, Rustem
collection PubMed
description All living organisms on Earth are made up of cells, which are the functional unit of life. Eukaryotic organisms can consist of a single cell (unicellular) or a group of either identical or different cells (multicellular). Biologists have always been fascinated by how a single cell, such as an egg, can give rise to an entire organism, such as the human body, composed of billions of cells, including hundreds of different cell types. This is made possible by cell division, whereby a single cell divides to form two cells. During a symmetric cell division, a mother cell produces two daughter cells, while an asymmetric cell division results in a mother and a daughter cell that have different fates (different morphologies, cellular compositions, replicative potentials, and/or capacities to differentiate). In biology, the cell cycle refers to the sequence of events that a cell must go through in order to divide. These events, which always occur in the same order, define the different stages of the cell cycle: G1, S, G2, and M. What is fascinating about the cell cycle is its universality, and the main reason for this is that the genetic information of the cell is encoded by exactly the same molecular entity with exactly the same structure: the DNA double helix. Since both daughter cells always inherit their genetic information from their parent cell, the underlying fundamentals of the cell cycle—DNA replication and chromosome segregation—are shared by all organisms. This review goes back in time to provide a historical summary of the main discoveries that led to the current understanding of how cells divide and how cell division is regulated to remain highly reproducible.
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spelling pubmed-88703402022-02-25 A Journey through Time on the Discovery of Cell Cycle Regulation Uzbekov, Rustem Prigent, Claude Cells Review All living organisms on Earth are made up of cells, which are the functional unit of life. Eukaryotic organisms can consist of a single cell (unicellular) or a group of either identical or different cells (multicellular). Biologists have always been fascinated by how a single cell, such as an egg, can give rise to an entire organism, such as the human body, composed of billions of cells, including hundreds of different cell types. This is made possible by cell division, whereby a single cell divides to form two cells. During a symmetric cell division, a mother cell produces two daughter cells, while an asymmetric cell division results in a mother and a daughter cell that have different fates (different morphologies, cellular compositions, replicative potentials, and/or capacities to differentiate). In biology, the cell cycle refers to the sequence of events that a cell must go through in order to divide. These events, which always occur in the same order, define the different stages of the cell cycle: G1, S, G2, and M. What is fascinating about the cell cycle is its universality, and the main reason for this is that the genetic information of the cell is encoded by exactly the same molecular entity with exactly the same structure: the DNA double helix. Since both daughter cells always inherit their genetic information from their parent cell, the underlying fundamentals of the cell cycle—DNA replication and chromosome segregation—are shared by all organisms. This review goes back in time to provide a historical summary of the main discoveries that led to the current understanding of how cells divide and how cell division is regulated to remain highly reproducible. MDPI 2022-02-17 /pmc/articles/PMC8870340/ /pubmed/35203358 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/cells11040704 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Review
Uzbekov, Rustem
Prigent, Claude
A Journey through Time on the Discovery of Cell Cycle Regulation
title A Journey through Time on the Discovery of Cell Cycle Regulation
title_full A Journey through Time on the Discovery of Cell Cycle Regulation
title_fullStr A Journey through Time on the Discovery of Cell Cycle Regulation
title_full_unstemmed A Journey through Time on the Discovery of Cell Cycle Regulation
title_short A Journey through Time on the Discovery of Cell Cycle Regulation
title_sort journey through time on the discovery of cell cycle regulation
topic Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8870340/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35203358
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/cells11040704
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