By using ultrafast laser pulses to slice off pieces of chromosomes and observe how the chromosomes behave, biomedical engineers at the University of Michigan have gained pivotal insights into mitosis, the process of cell division.

Telomeres, structures that cap the ends of cells' chromosomes, grow shorter with each round of cell division unless a specialized enzyme replenishes them. Maintaining telomeres is thought to be important for healthy aging and cancer prevention.

A research group lead by scientists at the University of Warwick has discovered the trigger that pulls together X chromosomes in female cells at a crucial stage of embryo development. Their discovery could also provide new insights into how other similar chromosomes spontaneously recognize each other and are bound together at key parts of analogous cell processes.

If chromosomes snuggle up too closely at the wrong times, the results can be genetic disaster.

A multinational group of investigators has discovered that people suffering from schizophrenia are far more likely to carry rare chromosomal structural changes of all types, particularly those that have the potential to alter gene function.

European researchers have made significant progress unravelling how genes are governed and why this sometimes goes wrong in disease. The key lies in the dynamic ever-changing structure of the chromatin, which is the underlying complex of protein and DNA making up the chromosomes in which almost all genes are housed within the genome.

The normal human genome contains 46 chromosomes: 23 from the mother and 23 from the father. Thus, you have two copies of every gene (excluding some irregularity in the pair of sex chromosomes). In general, which parent contributes a chromosome has no effect on the expression of the genes found on it.

Cell division is essential to life, but the mechanism by which emerging daughter cells organize and divvy up their genetic endowments is little understood. In a new study, researchers at the University of Illinois and Columbia University report on how a key motor protein orchestrates chromosome movements at a critical stage of cell division.

A team of scientists has provided, for the first time, a detailed map of how the building blocks of chromosomes, the cellular structures that contain genes, are organized in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

The Stowers Institute's Workman Lab has shed new light on a novel histone acetyltransferase protein complex called ATAC. Acetyltransferases are enzymes that introduce a new acetyl functional group into histone proteins, a process by which all chromosome functions are controlled.

Ten years ago, researchers at the IMP - a basic research institute in Vienna - discovered a fundamental and amazingly plausible mechanism of cell division. They identified a protein complex, which, as a ring-shaped molecule, slides over the doubled chromosomes and holds precisely these together until the time they again separate.

Crossovers and double-strand DNA breaks do not occur randomly on yeast chromosomes during meiosis, but are greatly influenced by the proximity of the chromosome’s telomere, according to research in the laboratory of Whitehead Fellow Andreas Hochwagen.