Cool Videos: Coordinated Chaos in the Cell’s Cytosol
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
When Amy Gladfelter arrived at the University of Basel in Switzerland to pursue post-doctoral work in 2001, she remembers that her research interests were still a little up in the air. As she settled into the new lab, Gladfelter remembers watching movies that others had made of the filamentous fungus Ashbya gossypii and wondering how on earth its myriad nuclei could share the same cytoplasm and do different things. Now, more than a decade later, this cell biologist finds herself at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., where she is leading a lab that is making its own thought-provoking movies and pushing the envelope in an effort to answer this and many other scientific questions.
As you’ll learn by watching this video, Gladfelter’s work has implications far beyond the world of fungi because the filamentous proteins called septins, which act to define territory within Ashbya cells, are very similar to certain proteins found in human cells. While such proteins are normally very flexible, they can morph into toxic, solid states in certain human disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s disease. Besides illustrating the value of Ashbya for uncovering clues to neurodegenerative disorders, this video delivers a broader message about the importance of all kinds of model organisms for efforts to understand our own biology.
This movie is our second installment from Celldance 2014, an annual video program sponsored by the American Society for Cell Biology. But the Oscar-equivalent grand finale is yet to come, so don’t forget to check back to close out this first-class show and presentation of science!
Links:
Ashbya gossypii, (Wikipedia)
Gladfelter Lab, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.
Celldance 2014, ASCB
NIH support: National Institute of General Medical Sciences
