A bouquet for meiotic spindle

During early meiosis, telomeres gather at the nuclear membrane, forming a structure of mysterious function dubbed the telomere bouquet. Kazunori Tomita and Julia Cooper (Cancer Research UK, London, UK) now report that the bouquet helps form the meiotic spindle and is therefore critical to chromosomal division.

Cooper previously showed that a telomere-binding protein called Taz1 is required for forming bouquets in fission yeast. The taz1 mutants are moderately defective in homologous recombination, which is thought to be the bouquet's main purpose. But their dominant fault lies in spore formation after meiosis—mutants often have too few spores containing uneven amounts of DNA.

To question why bouquet mutants disrupt meiosis, the team has now followed the dynamics of bouquet formation in live cells. In meiotic prophase of...