ROCHESTER, Minn. -- A Mayo Clinic discovery about a protein known as Dynamin-2 has thrown conventional wisdom for a loop. Finding the protein on the centrosome, a minute structure near a cell's nucleus, may lead to new strategies for stopping cancer growth.
The Mayo team, already known for discovering several families of dynamins, this time discovered them -- not on a membrane, as expected -- but on the unlikely centrosome which has no membrane. It was the last place they expected to find them, but the surprise finding offers a new lead in the fight against cancer.
"These findings provide us with a basic understanding of how normal and cancer cells are organized; how they divide and how they might grow and die -- which is an important part of cancer," says Mark McNiven, Ph.D., the cell biologist who led the Mayo Clinic research team's investigation. "A lot of cancers, you could argue, don't grow faster; they just don't die. So this discovery will improve our understanding of this very relevant cellular process. It promotes understanding the cell at its most basic level, giving us a new layer of detail."
The research is featured in the April issue of Nature Cell Biology (http://www.nature.com/ncb/).