Life Ascending by Lane Nick

Author:Lane, Nick [Lane, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-06-13T22:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.3 Actin filaments derived from the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, decorated with myosin ‘arrowheads’ from rabbit muscle.

The little arrowheads bind to actin and nothing else, so adding myosin heads to other cell types works as a test for the presence of actin filaments. Until the 1960s, everyone assumed that actin was a specialised muscle protein, undoubtedly found in the muscles of different species, but not in other types of cell. This conventional wisdom was just being challenged by biochemical data, which suggested that one of the most non-muscular of organisms, brewers’ yeast, might contain actin; but the simple expedient of decorating actin with myosin arrowheads opened a Pandora’s box of revelations. Huxley opened it first, by adding rabbit myosin to actin filaments extracted from slime mould, a very primitive organism, and finding a perfect match (see Fig. 6.3).

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