Building the Cell's Internal Skeleton - How Does It Happen, and Why Does It Matter?

The cytoskeleton is a network of protein filaments inside the cell that control the cell's shape and movements. Formins are one of the primary proteins that control the assembly of cytoskeletal filaments. We are learning how formins work using a combination of biochemical studies of pure proteins, microscopic analysis of cytoskeletal organization in cells, and observation of the effects of formin gene mutations on the simple model animal Caenorhabditis elegans.