Full-house at May's Cosy Science event
There was, yet again, a full-house and a fantastic atmosphere at our last Cosy Science Special event as our speaker, David Morgan, Professor at the University of California, took the stage to tell us about the wonderful world of cell biology. The evening was full of discussion and fuelled by drinks and food kindly provided by our sponsor The Company of Biologists.
The topic of discussion was not new: scientists have been trying to understand how cells are built since the 1800s. I must say this does not surprise me and, as a scientist myself, I have always been puzzled at how cells, such complex structures, are able to reproduce over and over again. Even more astonishing is that, despite the frequency of cell division, mistakes are relatively rare and almost always corrected.
According to our speaker, the complexity that we observe in cells can be compared to the one of the airplanes. Similarly to what happens in planes, cells are composed of many different components, each one responsible for performing a certain function. Despite this similarity, there is also a striking difference: contrary to the human-made machines, cells have the ability to self-reproduce. But how does this cell reproduction happen and how is it controlled? What needs to happen for a cell to divide? These were some of the topics addressed by our speaker.
Driven by our audience’s questions, we discussed how cells are social entities that only divide when necessary. Most cases of cell division happen in one of these three scenarios: when our bodies are growing, when we wound ourselves and need to repair our tissues, or in tissues like our skin and gut in which cells are constantly being shed and replaced. This controlled cell division is, however, lost in cancer: one of the underlying principles of cancer is that cells keep on dividing when or where they should not and, therefore, can generate tumours.
David went into further detail on how cells divide. He discussed the need to duplicate each cell component before each division. This duplication is essential to guarantee that the daughter cells are exactly like their mother. A crucial step during this duplication is the step of copying the genome, containing all the genes of the cell. Genes are located within chromosomes, X shaped structures. After duplication of the genome, each chromosome is bound to its sister chromosome by a glue. During cell division this glue is destroyed and rope-like structures pull the sister chromosomes to opposite end of the cell. In this way each pole of the cell will contain a whole set of chromosomes and can, therefore, become a new daughter cell. Lastly, we discussed how these processes have to happen in a sequential way. Socks first, shoes later, right? There are switches in the cell that have to be turned ON or OFF before the cell can move on to the next step. These switches allow for cell division to be such an accurate process.
It was undeniably a whole lot of fun. More to come next month!
Read more here: http://gettyscience.org/2015/06/the-mystery-of-celldivision/
