The anaphase-promoting complex: it's not just for mitosis any more

The ability of cells to make exact replicas of themselves is central to the life and development of complex organisms. Initial insights into the question of how cells divide came during the latter half of the 19th century when Walther Flemming visualized structures he called threads (which we now call chromosomes) and described how these threads change during cell multiplication, a process he called mitosis. Now, more than a century later, we have a molecular understanding of many of the cellular processes that Flemming observed. Indeed, major cytological events occurring during mitosis are known to constitute cell cycle transitions and are regulated by complex signal transduction pathways whose major components have been identified during the past decade. In this review, we describe recent efforts to understand how central components of this regulatory apparatus—cyclin-dependent kinases and the anaphase-promoting complex/cyclosome (APC/C)—control progression through the cell division cycle and how regulatory mechanisms impinge on the APC/C. The APC/C is the multisubunit ubiquitin ligase whose activity is precisely regulated to ensure the timely degradation of cyclins and other key cell cycle regulators in unperturbed cells and to respond to mitotic checkpoints that prevent their degradation. We pay particular attention to recent developments as excellent reviews are available from a few years ago (Morgan 1999; Zachariae and Nasmyth 1999).