Knowing when to cut and run: mechanisms that control cytokinetic abscission

•Spatiotemporal coordination of the abscission machinery is required for completion of cytokinesis.•CEP55 and MITD1 play key roles in the temporal regulation of the abscission machinery.•NoCut prevents DNA damage by delaying abscission in the context of lagging chromosomes.

Abscission, the final step of cytokinesis, mediates the severing of the membrane tether, or midbody, that connects two daughter cells. It is now recognized that abscission is a complex process requiring tight spatiotemporal regulation of its machinery to ensure equal chromosome segregation and cytoplasm content distribution between daughter cells. Failure to coordinate these events results in genetic damage. Here, we review recent evidence suggesting that proper abscission timing is coordinated by cytoskeletal rearrangements and recruitment of regulators of the Endosomal Sorting Complex Required for Transport (ESCRT) machinery such as CEP55 and MIT-domain-containing protein 1 (MITD1) to the abscission site. Additionally, we discuss the surveillance mechanism known as the Aurora B-mediated abscission checkpoint (NoCut), which prevents genetic damage by ensuring proper abscission delay when chromatin is trapped at the midbody.