Structure of the meiotic spindle

The meiotic spindle is made up of shorter microtubules than previously believed, suggest results from Ge Yang, Gaudenz Danuser (Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA), Ben Houghtaling, Tarun Kapoor (Rockefeller University, New York, NY), and colleagues. Current models of the spindle, as a bipolar array of overlapping filaments extending from opposite spindle poles, will require revision.

To get a closer look at the architecture of the meiotic spindle, Yang et al. incorporated labeled tubulin subunits into the spindle in a cell-free system. By refining their fluorescent speckle microscopy techniques, the authors were able for the first time to track individual tubulin subunits (seen as speckles) in a single tubulin polymer.

The authors identified pairs of speckles representing subunits on the same filament. Speckle separation supplied them with...