Tiny Tubes

Inside every cell of your body there’s a complex biological ‘scaffold’ made of tiny tubes, known as the cytoskeleton. These tubes are made up of billions of actin molecules, which come together in a similar way that Lego bricks click together to make large, stable structures. However, actin doesn’t act alone. Other molecules help the actin tubes to assemble, giving them different structural properties depending on the job they need to do inside the cell. One of these, called vinculin, plays a particularly important role in building strong yet flexible actin bundles at the sites where cells join together. Researchers have been growing actin tubes in the lab, altering the proportions of actin (top row) and vinculin (bottom row) in the mixture to see what happens to the resulting structures. Their findings help to explain how cells reorganise their internal scaffolding to stick to each other and build a body.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Rajaa Boujemaa-Paterski and colleagues
• Department of Biochemistry, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, November 2020