Volume 14, Issue 7, July 2024

Pauses in DNA replication can lead to entanglements between telomeres. If these entanglements cannot be resolved at mitosis, genomic instability ensues. Previous studies using the model organism, fission yeast, showed that telomere disentanglement is a particular challenge at moderately low temperatures. Here, a series of genetic screens aimed to identify the regulators of telomere disentanglement. A surprising involvement of factors that control the fluidity of the nuclear membrane in telomere disentanglement emerged.

Many tissues contain cells that may encounter variations of the canonical cell cycle during development, such as cell cycle truncations that prevent completion of events such as cytokinesis, or even prevent mitosis, resulting in binucleate cells. Here Box et al. describe the successive cell cycle truncations of a tissue in Drosophila where the cells exhibit multiple sequential truncations of the cell cycle resulting in a unique tissue configuration of polyploid and binucleate cells.

Wang et al. introduce Transposase-Assisted Tagmentation, a cost-effective method for whole-genome sequencing (WGS) in model organisms. This method, utilizing Tn5 transposase, requires minimal hands-on time and low cost. It effectively identifies causal mutations in mutants and is applicable to various species like yeast and algae. Overall, the authors’ method offers an economical and efficient approach for generating and identifying missense variants in diverse species.

Snow algae are an important group of photosynthetic microbes living on melting snow and glaciers around the world, but genomic resources are scarce. Here Hulatt et al. assembled and annotated a high quality genome of a Chlamydomonadalean snow alga from the Arctic. The assembly and annotations provide a first glimpse into the evolution and adaptive strategies of terrestrial microeukaryotes that have adapted to life at extremely low temperatures.