To avoid a mating mishap, yeast focus and communicate

During mating, yeast cells must perforate their rigid cell walls at the right place to allow cell-cell fusion. In this issue, Dudin et al. (2015; J.Cell Biol. http://dx.doi.org/ icb.201411124) image mating fission yeast cells with unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution. The authors find that when mating cells come into contact, they form asterlike actin structures that direct cell wall remodeling precisely to the point of contact.