dictyNews Volume 23 Number 05

Published in

· 11 months ago

Dicty News 
Electronic Edition 
Volume 23, number 5 
August 6, 2004 

Please submit abstracts of your papers as soon as they have been 
accepted for publication by sending them to dicty@northwestern.edu 
or by using the form at 
http://dictybase.org/db/cgi-bin/dictyBase/abstract_submit. 

Back issues of Dicty-News, the Dicty Reference database and other  
useful information is available at dictyBase - http://dictybase.org. 

 

 
============= 
  Abstracts 
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Evolutionarily conserved modules in actin nucleation: lessons from 
Dictyostelium and plants 

 
F. Cvrkov (1), F. Rivero (2) and B. Bavlnka (3) 

(1) Department of Plant Physiology, Faculty of Sciences, Charles University, 
Prague, Czechia 
(2) Center for Biochemistry, Medical Faculty, University of Cologne, 
Cologne, Germany 
(3) Laboratory of Cell Biology, Institute of Experimental Botany, Academy 
of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, Czechia 

Protoplasma, in press 

 
Summary. The actin cytoskeleton plays a central part in the dynamic 
organization of eukaryotic cell structure. Nucleation of actin filaments 
is a crucial step in the establishment of new cytoskeletal structures or 
modification of existing ones, providing abundant targets for regulatory 
processes. A substantial part of our understanding of actin nucleation 
derives from studies on yeast and metazoan cells. However, recent advances 
in structural and functional genome analysis in ãless traditionalä models, 
such as plants or Dictyostelium, provide an emerging picture of an 
evolutionarily conserved core of at least two actin nucleation mechanisms, 
one mediated by the Arp2/3 complex and the other one by the formin-based 
module. A considerable degree of conservation is found also in the systems 
controlling the F-actin/G-actin balance (profilin, ADF/cofilin) and even 
in certain regulatory aspects, such as the involvement of Rho-related small 
GTPases. Identification of such conserved elements provides a prerequisite 
for the characterization of evolutionarily variable aspects of actin 
regulation, which may be responsible for the rich morphological diversity 
of eukaryotic cells. 

 
Note: it took so long for Protoplasma to have the manuscript published that 
today, with the Dicty genome finished, an update of some details would be 
needed. However the main ideas are still valid and therefore the review 
should be useful to those interested. 

 

Submitted by: Francisco Rivero [francisco.rivero@uni-koeln.de] 

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[End Dicty News, volume 23, number 5]