A new member of the spindle orientation club: mammalian intestinal stem cells.

Mitotic spindles are stereotypically oriented in many stem cells, often leading to asymmetric outcomes of stem cell division. In this issue of Cell Stem Cell, Näthke and colleagues (Quyn et al., 2010) report that mammalian intestinal stem cells exhibit an oriented spindle and asymmetry during division. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.