Filament Fiddle

Give it a poke and see what happens. That’s every intrepid biologist’s first experiment, as a toddler in the garden exploring the natural world. And now some grown-up biologists have developed a somewhat more sophisticated means for precision fiddling with biological material, with a new tool to directly manipulate vimentin, a structural component of the cellular skeleton. Existing methods relied on observing long-term impact induced by gene editing or drugs, which often interfere with other structures too, muddying the waters when assessing which part does what. The new system uses light or chemicals to manipulate vimentin filaments, and the team found that this didn’t influence other parts of the cytoskeleton (microtubules pictured, highlighted in yellow and blue). The disruption shifted some cellular components (like mitochondria), but not others (lysosomes), reduced overall stiffness, and showcased a new tool to precisely study vimentin’s role in wound healing, cancer spread, and disease development.

This is a full summary to supersede the brief caption previously published on BPoD

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Milena Pasolli and Joyce C.M. Meiring, and colleagues
• Cell Biology, Neurobiology and Biophysics, Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Journal of Cell Biology, July 2025