Mesostoma ehrenbergii spermatocytes - a unique and advantageous cell for studying meiosis

Mesostoma ehrenbergii have a unique male meiosis: their spermatocytes have three large bivalents that oscillate for 1-2 hours before entering into anaphase without having formed a metaphase plate, have a precocious (“pre-anaphase”) cleavage furrow, and have four univalents that segregate between spindle poles without physical interaction between them, i.e., via “distance segregation”. These unique and unconventional features make Mesostoma spermatocytes an ideal organism for studying the force produced by the spindle to move chromosomes, and to study cleavage furrow control and ‘distance segregation’. In the present article we review the literature on meiosis in Mesostoma spermatocytes and describe the current research that we are doing using Mesostoma spermatocytes, rearing the animals in the laboratory using methods that we describe in our companion article (Hoang et al., 2013).