#actin

Eyes Have It

Cells couldn't perform their vital roles if they just flopped about like tiny water-filled balloons. Their inner scaffold or cytoskeleton of carefully constructed but dynamic structural protein fibres ensures cells are in the right shape for the job. A fruit fly's eye is an example of a highly-specialised tissue and here researchers have analysed in 3D how different structures formed of a cytoskeletal protein actin emerge over time as the eye develops culminating in the function-essential curved shape

Image made using Leica Microsystems microscopy

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Abhi Bhattarai and colleagues

Department of Biology, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Development, January 2026

Plastins may promote disease when they act like workaholics and disrupt cellular environment

A family of proteins that have a role in ensuring many types of cells move and maintain their shape may promote disease when they act like workaholics and disrupt the cellular environment, new research suggests. The study increases scientific understanding of plastins, whose job is to bind to and bundle other proteins that can be thought of as the bones and muscles of cells. Having a better…

-- motor protein type

-- play a role in muscle contraction

-- participate in various other motility processes in eukaryotes

-- ATP-dependent

-- responsible for actin-based motility

-- a large superfamily of genes

-- protein products share properties      -- actin binding      -- ATP hydrolysis      -- force transduction

-- most myosin molecules are made of a head, neck, and tail domain

#Lipilight #MemBright and super resolution #LiveSR on living muscle cells! by Bruno Cadot

Visit website : https://cadotbruno.com