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dictyNews Volume 32 Number 06
dictyNews
Electronic Edition
Volume 32, number 6
March 6, 2009
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 dictyNews, the Dicty Reference database and other
useful information is available at dictyBase - http://dictybase.org.
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Abstracts
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Review: Eukaryotic Chemotaxis
Wouter-Jan Rappel and William F. Loomis
Departments of Physics and Biology, University of California, San Diego
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Systems Biology and Medicine, in press
During eukaryotic chemotaxis, external chemical gradients guide the crawling
motion of cells. This process plays an important role in a large variety of
biological systems and has wide ranging medical implications. New
experimental techniques including confocal microscopy and microfluidics
have advanced our understanding of chemotaxis while numerical modeling
efforts are beginning to offer critical insights. In this short review, we
survey the current experimental status of the field by dividing chemotaxis
into three distinct 'modules': directional sensing, polarity and motility.
For each module, we attempt to point out potential new directions of research
and discuss how modeling studies interact with experimental investigations.
Submitted by: Bill Loomis [wloomis@ucsd.edu]
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Filopodia: Complex models for simple rods
Jan Faix (1), Dennis Breitsprecher (1), Theresia E.B. Stradal (2) and
Klemens Rottner (2).
(1) Inst. for Biophysical Chemistry, Hannover Medical School, Germany.
(2) Helmholz Center for Infection Research, Braunschweig, Germany.
International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology, in press.
Filopodia are prominent cell surface projections filled with bundles of linear
actin filaments that drive their protrusion. These structures are considered
important sensory organelles, for instance in neuronal growth cones or during
the fusion of sheets of epithelial tissues. In addition, they can serve a
precursor function in adhesion site or stress fibre formation. Actin filament
assembly is essential for filopodia formation and turnover, yet the precise
molecular mechanisms of filament nucleation and/or elongation are
controversial. Indeed, conflicting reports on the molecular requirements of
filopodia initiation have prompted researchers to propose different types
and/or alternative or redundant mechanisms mediating this process.
However, recent data shed new light on these questions, and they indicate
that the balance of a limited set of biochemical activities can determine the
structural outcome of a given filopodium. Here we focus on discussing our
current view of the relevance of these activities, and attempt to propose a
molecular mechanism of filopodia assembly based on a single core
machinery.
Submitted by: Hans Faix [faix@bpc.mh-hannover.de]
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[End dictyNews, volume 32, number 6]
