The body’s cells divide around 10 quadrillion times in a lifetime. This carefully regulated process enables an original cell to replicate itself, giving rise to two daughter cells, each with a precise copy of the cell’s DNA.

Microtubules play a critical role in allocating the chromosomes to the two daughter cells. Microtubules make up the cytoskeleton, the “scaffolding” that grows and shrinks to support the cell’s architecture and coordinate its movements, and tubulins are the proteins responsible for forming these microtubules and for how they act.

More than 40 years ago, researchers described what is today known as the “tubulin code”: the diversity of structural variants and chemical modifications undergone by these proteins,