{"doi":"10.1371/journal.pgen.1009567","title":"A degron-based strategy reveals new insights into Aurora B function in C. elegans","abstract":"The widely conserved kinase Aurora B regulates important events during cell division. Surprisingly, recent work has uncovered a few functions of Aurora-family kinases that do not require kinase activity. Thus, understanding this important class of cell cycle regulators will require strategies to distinguish kinase-dependent from independent functions. Here, we address this need in C. elegans by combining germline-specific, auxin-induced Aurora B (AIR-2) degradation with the transgenic expression of kinase-inactive AIR-2. Through this approach, we find that kinase activity is essential for AIR-2's major meiotic functions and also for mitotic chromosome segregation. Moreover, our analysis revealed insight into the assembly of the ring complex (RC), a structure that is essential for chromosome congression in C. elegans oocytes. AIR-2 localizes to chromosomes and recruits other components to form the RC. However, we found that while kinase-dead AIR-2 could load onto chromosomes, other components were not recruited. This failure in RC assembly appeared to be due to a loss of RC SUMOylation, suggesting that there is crosstalk between SUMOylation and phosphorylation in building the RC and implicating AIR-2 in regulating the SUMO pathway in oocytes. Similar conditional depletion approaches may reveal new insights into other cell cycle regulators.","journal":"PLoS Genetics","year":2021,"id":170854,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":27,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9567,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":703999,"name":"Amanda C. Davis-Roca","orcid":"0000-0003-2656-5758","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":704000,"name":"Liangyu Zhang","orcid":"0000-0002-2701-0773","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":23409,"name":"Abby F. Dernburg","orcid":"0000-0001-8037-1079","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":458500,"name":"Sarah M. Wignall","orcid":"0000-0001-9828-9356","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":703998,"name":"Nikita S. Divekar","orcid":"0009-0006-9384-8407","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":57,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:46:24.040760Z","pmid":"34014923","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}