Ling-Huei Yih's Lab｜Institute of Cellular and Organismic Biology, Academia Sinica

The mitosis-mediated cell death is a type of cell death occurs during or after aberrant mitosis and is now recognized as an important mechanism underlying the therapeutic effects of several anticancer drugs that target at DNA, chromosome, and/or the chromosome segregation machineries. On the other hand, chromosome instability, the hallmark of cancers, may develop in cells surviving mitotic errors. Therefore, by understanding how the mitosis-mediated cell death is regulated, we may help prevent or treat diseases that result from induction of aberrant mitosis and/or genetic instability such as cancers. The compounds that can damage DNA and/or microtubule are used to investigate how aberrant mitosis is induced and how aberrant mitosis triggers the initiation of mitotic cell death in a cell-based context. We focused on the signaling pathway linking induction of DNA damage, mitotic abnormalities, and mitosis-mediated apoptosis. The focuses of this laboratory are (1) to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms of how mitotic catastrophe is triggered; (2) to investigate the role of phosphatidylinositol on regulation of microtubule dynamic during mitosis (Figure 1); and (3) to identify novel chemical compounds that induce mitotic catastrophe (Figure 2).