Lighting the circle of life: fluorescent sensors for covert surveillance of the cell cycle.

The cell cycle is the collective mechanism through which all of us develop, exist and in many cases, when it goes wrong, die. Despite enormous progress in unravelling the complexity of the cell cycle through intensive study over the past 100 years, development of new tools to analyse the process and associated cellular events has not kept pace. All standard cell cycle analysis methods preclude real time dynamic analysis of the cell cycle in live cells at single cell resolution. To address the needs of cell cycle investigations across a range of analysis platforms we are currently developing a range of cell cycle phase markers based on GFP expression controlled by well characterised cell cycle components to allow covert surveillance of the cell cycle in living cells.