A Conversation with Angelika Amon
- Senior Editor, Science
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Angelika Amon is a Professor at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Guy Riddihough:Tell us about chromosomes and cell division, and what happens so that we can understand why it's important to know how it works.
Dr. Amon:The DNA, which encodes all the information to build an organism, is basically strings of information. Before a cell divides, it looks like spaghetti soup. There's all these strings swimming around in that soup. If you want to make two cells, you need to copy the spaghetti and then divide them so that each daughter cell receives a copy of each spaghetti. To divide the spaghetti, you further need to compact them and then attach them to an apparatus that segregates them. This is an unbelievably complicated process, yet cells do it with such ease, and more importantly, with such accuracy. We want to understand how …
