Abstracts
Bayer Pharmaceuticals PhD Award
Assembly principles of the kinetochore corona and their relevance for mitotic checkpoint signaling
Verena Cmentowski
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK, vcmentowski@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk
The kinetochore corona is a transient, fibrous structure that forms early in mitosis to support efficient chromosome alignment and ensure faithful segregation. Despite its importance, the molecular principles underlying corona formation have remained poorly understood. In my doctoral work, I discovered that the kinesin CENP E plays a central and previously unrecognized role in building the corona architecture. Rather than acting solely in chromosome congression, CENP E directly contributes to the assembly of the RZZ based corona scaffold. Furthermore, we uncovered that corona formation is initiated through two distinct recruitment pathways within the outer kinetochore and requires a regulatory interface that also governs mitotic checkpoint signaling. Competition between corona components and checkpoint factors for this shared binding site establishes a mechanism that tightly couples corona assembly to error correction pathways. Together, these findings outline how the kinetochore integrates structural and signaling functions to prevent chromosome mis segregation and disease.
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