The kinetochore uncoiled

Bill Brinkley had first described the kinetochore in the 1960s. He saw, by electron microscopy, a trilaminar, proteinaceous disc structure that flanked the centromere (Brinkley and Stubblefield, 1966). But further details were obscure for another 20 years.

Raymond Zinkowski planned to change that. When he joined Brinkley's lab at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, as a grad student in 1986, “only a handful of labs were seriously investigating the centromeric region of chromosomes,” says Zinkowski. “It just looked like a parking place for a kinetochore handle to move chromosomes.”

Zinkowski became interested when studies using autoantibodies from scleroderma patients identified kinetochore-associated proteins (Earnshaw and Rothfield, 1985). Brinkley already held a notion that the kinetochore might be organized as repeat subunits. The Indian muntjac, a small Asian deer, had been...