A methods chapter written by Alex Thompson and Sarah Vandal describing an assay for quantitatively comparing polar ejection forces in mammalian mitotic cells is now published in Methods in Molecular Biology: Mitosis. Alex’s images of monopolar spindles are also featured on the cover of the book! Congrats Alex and Sarah!

A great collaboration with Michael Cianfrocco, Puck Ohi, and Dave Sept at Univ of Michigan resulted in a detailed structural model and mechanistic description of kinesin inhibition by KIFBP. Postdoc Katie Schutt contributed all of the cell biology experiments to test the physiological relevance of the model. You can check out the manuscript here.

Leslie’s manuscript on the impact of micronuclei was awarded the 2021 Outstanding Research Publication Award from UVM’s Larner College of Medicine. Jason was awarded the 2021 Mid-Career Investigator Award. Congratulations to both Leslie and Jason!

Our latest collaborative study with Laura Reinholdt (The Jackson Laboratory) was published in The Journal of Cell Biology. This work shows that micronuclei in Kif18a mutant mice are stable and rarely rupture and indicates that different “types” of micronuclei behave differently. Congratulations Leslie! See our Tweetorial about the paper here.

This work describes how point mutations in KIF22 that dominantly cause a rare bone development disorder prevent inactivation of KIF22’s activity at the metaphase-to-anaphase transition. Check out the preprint here. Also see Alex’s Tweetorial describing the paper here.

Congratulations to CMB Ph.D. student Leslie Sepaniac on the successful defense of her dissertation! A huge milestone!

Wonderful press coverage of our recent work identifying KIF18A as a potential cancer target in:

Seven Days

Local news interviews (here and here)

A story focused on undergrad contributions from Carolyn Marquis and Lisa Wood

This study describes an unexpected dependency of tumor cells that exhibit chromosome instability (CIN) on KIF18A for proliferation and survival.

The tumor cell screens in this study were greatly facilitated by a collaboration with Joe Clayton at BioTek Instruments. Funding from Susan G. Komen also brought together a fantastic team of scientists, clinicians, and patient advocates that provided key insights for the design of this work.

A press release summarizing the impact of the work and its connection to two recently published Nature papers can be found here.

Congratulations to Carolyn Marquis, who began this work as an undergraduate researcher in the lab, and all of the authors!

This study, led by Uri Ben-David at Tel Aviv University, uncovers genes that aneuploid tumor cells depend on more than near-diploid cells, including spindle assembly checkpoint components and KIF18A. This major collaborative effort involved six labs in five different countries.

Congrats to Stumpff Lab members Carolyn Marquis and Heidi Malaby, who co-authored this paper! A press release describing the work can be found here and a complementary co-published study from Neil Ganem’s lab on genes required for genome duplicated tumor cells can be found here.

In collaboration with Laura Reinholdt, Leslie Sepaniac examined the impact and stability of micronuclei formed in vivo due to loss of Kif18a both in normal tissues and in tumors that develop in p53 null mice. She shows that micronuclei in Kif18a loss of function cells have stable nuclear envelopes both in vivo and in vitro and that this is likely explained by the subcellular positioning of lagging chromosomes that form micronuclei in late mitosis. Check out the preprint here.