Arnaud Echard: Adieu, ma soeur

D uring cytokinesis, the two daughter cells begin separating from each other through constriction of an actomyosin ring. The cells then remain connected via a narrow cytoplasmic intercellular bridge for several hours while the membrane is remodeled at the fi ssion site. Only then can they part ways. Arnaud Echard wants to know how cytokinesis is achieved and regulated. By leveraging his background in membrane dynamics (1, 2) and cytokinesis (3), Echard has demonstrated that traffi cking (4) and modifi cation of membrane lipids (5) drive cytoskeletal reorganization at the cyto-plasmic bridge. To learn more, we called him at his lab at France's Institut Pasteur. Do you recall your fi rst encounter with biology? When I was 11 or 12 I received a little book for kids on protozoa. It had beautiful pictures of these wild-looking organisms, and it also described a protocol you could use to culture protozoa. My brother had a chil-dren's microscope, so I followed the protocol and looked at a homemade broth under the microscope. But back then I was also interested in chemistry and astronomy. At that time it was easy to get chemicals for experiments, and for some reason my parents let me do this. Maybe they didn't realize the danger. [Laughs] I actually recently came across a little lab notebook that I kept when I was 16, describing the chemistry experiments I conducted in the garden shed behind our house. It wasn't until I was in the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon that I was fi rst exposed to the fi eld of cell biology. How did you fi rst come to work on Rab proteins? It was when I was a graduate student in Bruno Goud's lab at the Institut Curie in Paris. His lab has a lot of expertise on the Golgi apparatus, and I remember that when I came to the lab I had the choice to characterize several different partial cD-NAs encoding potential interactors of a Golgi-localized Rab protein. Just by chance I picked one that turned out to be a kinesin. At the time the genome was not yet sequenced, so I spent about six months creating a library of phages to use in cloning this kinesin-encoding gene—some-thing that today takes only two days. It is now so simple to click and order a full-length clone from a company. [Laughs] Anyway, this kinesin was one of the fi …