Hidden switch in cell division may point to new cancer treatments

When a cell gets ready to divide, it shuts down its gene-reading machinery almost entirely. For decades, the mechanism behind that shutdown was only partially understood. A new study co-led by Alarcón and Lilian Kabeche, associate professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale School of Medicine, identifies a missing piece: an enzyme best known for tagging RNA molecules that turns out to be wired into the cell division machinery itself. The findings, recently published in Molecular Cell, may point toward new cancer therapies.