Filopodia help cells move but also aid cancer spread. Scientists have revealed how fascin proteins build these structures, ...

Caltech researchers demonstrated a new method to use light to control active matter—a kind of material made up of individual ...

Alushin. "Going forward, hopefully we've made it easier to study these protein networks, where function emerges at the level of thousands of molecules." Alushin's lab specializes in understanding the ...

The cytoskeleton of eukaryotic cells is made of filamentous proteins, and it provides mechanical support to the cell and its cytoplasmic constituents. All cytoskeletons consist of three major ...

Unlike a human skeleton, though, the cytoskeleton in cells doesn't contain bones. Instead, it's made up of microtubules (long polymer tubes of the tubulin protein) and microfilaments made from the ...

But Portnoy, who joined UPenn’s medical school in 1988, had found he could block this cell-to-cell spread by chemically inhibiting the polymerization of actin, a protein that cells use to build an ...

Every cell in the body normally has its fixed place as part of a tissue structure. Except for a few cell types, such as blood ...

In the closed state, cells do not generate filopodia as shown in the right bottom image (green=IRSp53, red=cdc42, and blue=actin, the most abundant protein in the cytoskeleton). The arrow between ...

Remarkably, these surface proteins, along with the lipids forming the membrane ... In our lab, we aim to elucidate the interplay of clathrin structures with the actin cytoskeleton and cellular ...