Gene of the Month - Matrimony

And finally it's time for our Gene of the Month, and this time it's Matrimony. Another fruit fly gene, Matrimony encodes a protein that's found at high levels in fruit fly eggs, but rapidly vanishes after the egg is fertilised and starts growing into a little maggot. It gets its name from the fact that it's responsible for holding together pairs of chromosomes in the final stages of cell division when an egg is formed - a process known as meiosis - before they separate when the egg is fertilised, at the very beginning of development.