eLife published our paper, “Evolution of an ancient protein function involved in organized multicellularity in animals,” and the brilliant Carl Zimmer covered it in a nice article in the New York Times. The paper discusses the evolution of a new protein function essential for orientation of the mitotic spindle in amimals. Led by graduate student Doug Anderson with additional contributions from our own Victor Hanson-Smith, as well as Arielle Woznicka and Nicole King at Berkeley and collaborator Ken Prehoda at the University of Oregon, we showed that a single historical substitution was sufficient to confer this new function on a scaffolding protein that links the mitotic spindle to localized cues on the cell cortex. This is a story of molecular exploitation that helped to establish molecular processes essential to the complexity of multicellular animals.
Read the paper here.
The New York Times story is here.