Introducing our Authors

Abstract

A major interest of mine is the use of cell-based screening of natural products to identify new chemicals that affect cell-cycle progression.I find it attractive that these chemicals can serve as tools to study biological mechanisms and that they may have therapeutic potential. My work has identified a structural class of compounds that arrest cells at an early stage of mitosis. It was an exciting step forward for us to be able to chemically modify the compound described in this paper in a way that allowed the identification of its binding partners and the visualization of its binding sites within the cell. This paper illustrates a chemical genetics approach to studying the complex pathways in mitosis specifically, but the strategy may be applied to protein target identification in other systems as well.(Read Rundle's article on p 443.