Holding on to peroxisomes

In the field of organelle inheritance, peroxisomes are the forgotten stepchild no more. Fagarasanu et al. (page 765) find that a previously uncharacterized protein, Inp1p, tethers a fraction of the peroxisomes to the cortex of the mother cell during bud formation in S. cerevisiae. Cells lacking Inp1p lose almost all peroxisomes to the bud.

Yeast cells are known to actively partition organelles between the mother and bud during division. Mitochondria, for example, are subjected to both retention and ordered movement to ensure that a proper fraction of the organelles end up in each cell after cytokinesis. In the case of peroxisomes, researchers knew that a subset of the organelles moved into the bud in a myosin-dependent manner, but a retention mechanism hadn't been detected.Inp1p was putatively localized to the peroxisome based on...