The actin filament is astonishingly well conserved across a diverse set of eukaryotic species. It has essentially remained unchanged in the billion years that separate yeast, Arabidopsis and man. In contrast, bacterial actin-like proteins have diverged to the extreme, and many of them are not readily identified from sequence-based homology searches. Here, we present phylogenetic analyses that p...

The Hasimoto planar vortex filament is one of the rare exact solutions to the classical local induction approximation (LIA). This solution persists in the absence of friction or other disturbances, and it maintains its form over time. As such, the dynamics of such a filament have not been extended to more complicated physical situations. We consider the planar vortex filament under the quantum ...

Functionally different subsets of actin filament arrays contribute to cellular organization and motility. We report the identification of a novel subset of loose actin filament arrays through regulated association with the widely expressed protein SWAP-70. These loose actin filament arrays were commonly located behind protruding lamellipodia and membrane ruffles. Visualization of these loose ac...

The contractile and enzymatic activities of myosin VI are regulated by calcium binding to associated calmodulin (CaM) light chains. We have used transient phosphorescence anisotropy to monitor the microsecond rotational dynamics of erythrosin-iodoacetamide-labeled actin with strongly bound myosin VI (MVI) and to evaluate the effect of MVI-bound CaM light chain on actin filament dynamics. MVI bi...

Myosin-II’s rod-like tail drives filament assembly with a head arrangement that should generate equal and opposite contractile forces on actin – if one assumes that the filament is a symmetric bipole. Self-assembled myosin filaments are shown here to be asymmetric in physiological buffer based on cross-correlated images from both atomic force microscopy (AFM) and total internal reflection fluor...

We present first results from the Herschel Gould Belt survey for the B211/L1495 region in the Taurus molecular cloud. Thanks to their high sensitivity and dynamic range, the Herschel images reveal the structure of the dense, star-forming filament B211 with unprecedented detail, along with the presence of striations perpendicular to the filament and generally oriented along the magnetic field di...

In neutrophils activated to secrete with formyl-methionyl-leucyl-phenylalanine, intermediate filaments are phosphorylated transiently by cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP)-dependent protein kinase (G-kinase). cGMP regulation of vimentin organization was investigated. During granule secretion, cGMP levels were elevated and intermediate filaments were transiently assembled at the pericortex to...

Tropomodulin is a tropomyosin-binding protein that terminates "pointed-end" actin filament polymerization. To test the hypothesis that regulation of tropomodulin:actin filament stoichiometry is critical for maintenance of actin filament length, tropomodulin levels were altered in cells by infection with recombinant adenoviral expression vectors, which produce either sense or antisense tropomodu...

The organization of intermediate filaments in cultured epithelial cells was rapidly and radically affected by intracellularly injected monoclonal antikeratin filament antibodies. Different antibodies had different effects, ranging from an apparent splaying apart of keratin filament bundles to the complete disruption of the keratin filament network. Antibodies were detectable within cells for mo...

A facultatively filamentous bacterium was isolated from eutrophic lake water and was identified as Flectobacillus sp. strain MWH38 (a member of the Cytophaga-Flavobacterium-Bacteroides phylum) by comparative 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis. Filament formation by Flectobacillus sp. strain MWH38 and filament formation by Flectobacillus major, the closest known relative of strain MWH38, were studi...