Structural Studies on Cytoskeletal Proteins.

A number of componenets of cytoskeleton are very large proteins which are in their complete native form non amenable to the structure determination via X-ray diffraction techniques due to their non-globular shape and intrinsic flexibility which hinder the formation of suitable crystals. Dissecting such proteins into their representative building blocks-domains and subsequent structural studies of these have shown to give valuable structural and functional information on the biological system. Structural and evolutionary studies on actin-binding domains from spectrin and alpha-actinin as well as on the two central repeats of alpha-actinin will be presented.