A rush hour towards sexual reproduction: The chromosome dynamics during meiosis

Abstract

All Chinese born in the 1960's know the famous movie script "the function of a horse tail". Indeed, there is another famous "horse tail" in the field of basic biology, the premeiotic nucleus in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. It is not only because of its characteristic shape which looks like a horse tail, but also its dramatic oscillatory movement called "the horsetail movement". In the horsetail nucleus, all of the ends of chromosomes, the telomeres, are tightly clustering under spindle pole body (a centrosome equivalent in yeasts). Actually, this horsetail chromosome arrangement is an extreme form of so called "bouquet arrangement", a polarized chromosome arrangement with all the telomeres clustered in a confined area on the nuclear envelope. Bouquet arrangement is widely conserved meiotic prophase chromosomal phenomenon among eukaryotes. From study of the horsetail nucleus in fission yeast, many progresses have been made in the field of meiosis. © 2011 Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.