The actin-binding protein vinculin is a major constituent of focal adhesion, but its role in neuronal development poorly understood. We found that deletion mouse neocortical neurons attenuated axon growth both vitro and vivo. Using functional mutants, we expression constitutively active significantly enhanced while the head-neck domain had an inhibitory effect. Interestingly, vinculin-talin int...

background and objective: inflammatory pseudotumor  is a lesion composed of proliferating spindle cells with mixed inflammatory infiltrates. some authors have proposed the name inflammatory myofibroblastic tumor as a proper descriptive term rather than the vague inflammatory pseudotumor. the aim of this study was to verify the myofibroblastic origin of spindle cells in idiopathic orbital inflam...

Actin polymerization has been shown to be sufficient to propel curved objects, for example beads and vesicles coated with the Listeria monocytogenes protein ActA. Recent studies suggest that actin polymerization on flat surfaces can also provide the propulsive force to push them forward.

Cofilin stimulates actin filament turnover in vivo. The phenotypes of twenty yeast cofilin mutants generated by systematic mutagenesis were determined. Ten grew as well as the wild type and showed no cytoskeleton defects, seven were recessive-lethal and three were conditional-lethal and caused severe actin organization defects. Biochemical characterization of interactions between nine mutant ye...

The actin cytoskeleton is constantly assembling and disassembling. Cells harness the energy of these turnover dynamics to drive cell motility and organize cytoplasm. Although much is known about how cells control actin polymerization, we do not understand how actin filaments depolymerize inside cells. I briefly describe how the combination of imaging actin filament dynamics in cells and using i...

In the presence of condensing agents such as nonadsorbing polymer, multivalent counter ions, and specific bundling proteins, chiral biopolymers typically form bundles with a finite thickness, rather than phase-separating into a polymer-rich phase. Although short-range repulsive interactions or geometrical frustrations are thought to force the equilibrium bundle size to be limited, the precise m...