The Mammalian Meiotic Spindle: A Living Material

Meiosis is the specialized form of cell division that creates gametes. During meiosis, genetic material from the "mother" cell is copied and divided between several "daughter" cells. To facilitate this task, the mother cell builds a structure, the meiotic spindle, that organizes and moves chromosomes over length-scales of tens of microns and time-scales of several hours. While we have a (nearly) complete "parts list" of the dozens of bio-molecules that make up the spindle, it is far from clear how these molecules self-organize to into structures with the mechanical properties that allow the spindle to produce forces and transmit them to chromosomes over the required length- and time-scales. In this talk, I will present data and analysis that suggests that many aspects of the large-scale structure and long-time dynamics of meiotic spindles in living cells can be understood via a relatively simple continuum picture in which the spindle is modeled as an active liquid crystal.