A new review article in Current Opinion in Cell Biology by Molecular and Cell Biology grad student Melissa Chesarone and Biology’s Professor Bruce Goode focuses on a group of remarkable protein machines that rapidly assemble actin polymers in cells. These factors are essential for cell division, cell movement, and cell shape determination in virtually all organisms. Their catalytic mechanisms involve intricate fast-moving parts, which enables them to construct entire actin networks in a matter of seconds.
How actin networks assemble in cells
January 29, 2009 By
Actin "pointers" for EM labeling
December 22, 2008 By
Single particle electron microscopy reconstruction can be a powerful tool for determining the structure of large protein complexes. One limitation of the technique is the difficulty in coming up with specific labels for the protein that can be visualized with EM. In a new paper in RNA, postdoc Beth Stroupe and coworkers show that the use of the actin-nucleating protein Spire as a cloneable tag allows them to nucleate actin filaments that then “point” to the location of the tag in the complex seen in EM, and applied the technique to their studies of the C complex spliceosome.
