Wave Mapping

Who knew scaffolding could be so mesmerising? At least it is here with these waves of ‘molecular scaffolding’ in starfish embryos. Much like we have skeletons, cells have similar structures made up of a protein called actin (orange and right panel), just under their surface, but theirs can change shape to respond to different tasks. Restructuring involves disassembling and reassembling blocks of actin to create long filaments and is supported by a protein called Rho (blue and left panel) to stick the blocks together. Mapping waves of these building partners researchers not only find out how they work together during actin assembly, but also what happens when assembly is disrupted (by the addition of a molecule called latrunculin near the start of this video) where we see less coordinated waves between these two proteins.

Written by Sophie Arthur

Sophie Arthur

former Science Communications Officer MRC LMS

Formerly a stem cell biologist, Sophie has since moved into science communication working at the MRC LMS. She also writes an award winning science and education blog Soph talks science.

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• Video from work by Ani Michaud and colleagues
• University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Journal of Cell Biology, June 2022