Two negatives make a positive

Antagonists that are themselves antagonized play a common regulatory role in molecular biology. Peter Schlögelhofer, along with first author Ignacio Prusén Mota and their team, has now identified that the WAPL antagonist SORORIN is not confined to vertebrates but evolutionarily conserved, also to be found in Arabidopsis thaliana and Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Furthermore, they obtained the first in vivo evidence that SORORIN antagonizes WAPL, which is in turn a cohesin antagonist. The study, published in Nature Communications in collaboration with the lab of Jan Michael Peters (Institute of Molecular Pathology), provides valuable insights into the molecular regulation of chromosome segregation in mitotic and meiotic cells.

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