Re-staging mitosis: a contemporary view of mitotic progression

The process of cell division, or mitosis, has fascinated biologists since i ts discovery in the late 1870s. Progress through mitosis is traditionally d ivided into stages that were defined over 100 years ago from analyses of fi xed material from higher plants and animals. However, this terminology ofte n leads to ambiguity especially when comparing different systems. We theref ore suggest that mitosis can be re-staged to reflect more accurately the mo lecular pathways that underlie key transitions.