Researchers have identified a biochemical “stopwatch” mechanism that times the duration of mitosis and helps prevent cells that take too long from proliferating further—serving as a built-in quality control system against potential cancerous growths.
What They Found :
Mitosis (the process by which one cell splits its chromosomes into two daughter cells) normally takes - 30 minutes. The team discovered a pathway that monitors how long a cell spends in mitosis. If mitosis is delayed beyond a certain threshold, that “memory” is passed to daughter cells, which may inhibit further division as a safety measure. The mechanism involves proteins including p53, a well-known tumor suppressor gene. Many cancers appear to disable this stopwatch, tolerating prolonged mitotic errors and genome instability.
Why It Matters:
This discovery offers a new lens through which to view how cells maintain genomic integrity and suppress tumor development. The stopwatch could become a biomarker to assess cancer risk or progression. Future therapies might target this timing mechanism to selectively penalize or stop faulty cell division in cancer cells.
Related & Emerging Topics in Mitosis Research:
Mitosis in cancer cells: Some cancers “cheat” during @Mitosis Official by passing on especially malignant chromosome sets to daughter cells. Inducing mitosis in developmental biology: Recent work shows experimental induction of a reductive division (called “mitomeiosis”) in human somatic cells via oocyte cytoplasm manipulation.
AI in pathology: A new teacher-student model has been introduced for detecting and classifying mitotic figures in images (MIDOG 2025 challenge), improving pathology workflows.
Domain-adaptable detection: Researchers proposed a Mamba-based method to make mitosis detection robust under shifting image domains (staining or slide variations).
