The awe-inspiring process of cell division can turn a fertilized egg into a baby – or a cancerous cell into a malignant tumor. With so much at stake, nature keeps it tightly controlled in a process ...

Researchers discovered that a long-misunderstood protein plays a key role in helping chromosomes latch onto the right “tracks” during cell division. Instead of acting like a motor, it works more like ...

It's long been assumed that when a parent cell divides into two daughter cells, the parent assumes a spherical shape, which then splits into two cells that have roughly the same, round size. But a new ...

MIT researchers discovered that the genome’s 3D structure doesn’t vanish during cell division as previously thought. Instead, tiny loops called microcompartments remain (and even strengthen) while ...

As the cell proceeds through the stages of cell division (from left to right: interphase, prometaphase, metaphase, and anaphase), chromosomes become progressively more compact through a combination of ...

Cell division is fundamental to life, enabling growth, reproduction, and survival across all organisms, from single-celled bacteria to complex multicellular animals. While animals and fungi share a ...

Every day, our bodies perform around 330 billion cell divisions to keep us alive and functioning. These divisions rely on the cell cycle, which has been in place since the earliest bacteria. The ...

An organism grows and repairs its body using a form of cell division known as mitosis. To divide, a cell must replicate the chromosomes, which carry the DNA (the instructions needed to build the body) ...