Commentary Cellscience Reviews Vol 4 No 2 ISSN 1742-8130

When Cdk1 is abandoned

Cyclin-dependent kinases (Cdks) are serine/threonine kinases that form complexes with cyclins to regulate cell cycle progression. Cdks have been extensively studied over the past two decades and offer potential as targets for cancer therapy. The traditional cell cycle model has implicated at least five kinases as being indispensable for cell division. This dogma was initially challenged when successive mouse knockouts of the Cdk genes were engineered. A recent study by Santamaria et al. has now toppled the traditional model by showing that Cdk1 is the only essential Cdk required for cellular division.

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