Dyche Mullins: Finding filaments at the fringes

JCB • VOLUME 209 • NUMBER 1 • 2015 4 Dyche Mullins morphed from an electrical engineer to a cell biologist during his doctoral work at the University of Kentucky. Attending the intense Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) Physiology Course assured his transformation and earned him a postdoctoral spot with the course director at the time, Tom Pollard. During his time in Pollard’s lab, fi rst at Johns Hopkins University and then at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Mullins discovered the role that the Arp2/3 complex plays in nucleating branched actin networks. After establishing his own laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, at the end of 1998, Mullins’s team discovered another actin nucleation factor, Spire. Mullins returned to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to lead the Physiology Course in the summers of 2009–2013, codirecting with his former lab partner Clare Waterman. Lately, his group has been preoccupied with actin’s unorthodox side: the mysterious functions of nuclear actin (1), the connection between actin assembly and DNA damage– induced cell death (2, 3), and the mechanisms that actin-like proteins (ALPs) found in bacteria use to push plasmids around (4). Mullins spoke with JCB about his recent collaboration with Nobel-winning microscopist Eric Betzig (5) and how his name might have destined him to investigate the structural engineering inside cells.