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Abstract
Cell division is one of the mysterious wonders of life. A great number of cells divide in our body. Thereby a new daughter cell always arises from a mother cell, never from scratch. The actual cell division involves two processes: mitosis (nuclear division) and cytokinesis (cytoplasmic division). DNA is the master instruction set for all that makes cells work. It is in the cells best interest to duplicate the DNA properly and distribute the new copies to the daughter cells in a highly choreographed and controlled fashion. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, septin proteins play a key role in coupling mitosis and cytokinesis. The filamentous fungus Aspergillus nidulans does not undergo complete cytokinesis, but needs to coordinate nuclear division with cellular partitioning nevertheless. It has four core septin genes, aspA (an ortholog of S. cerevisiae CDC11), aspB (CDC3), aspC (CDC12), and aspD (CDC10) and one septin gene with no S. cerevisiae ortholog, aspE. We have found that, unlike the other three core septin deletion mutants, the deletion of aspD does not alter the vegetative morphology of A. nidulans, but results in misshaped nuclei, asynchronous nuclear division and mislocalization of nucleolar proteins.