Molecular Cell Biology Section
John A Hammer, III, PhD, Principal Investigator
The long range goals of the section are to identify and characterize unconventional myosins, and to define their roles in the motility of cells and organelles. Efforts focus primarily on Dictyostelium and mouse as model systems. We use a variety of approaches to attain these goals, including (i) biochemical and biophysical characterization of purified or bacculovirus-expressed myosins, (ii) localization of myosins using light immunofluorescence microscopy, immumoelectron microscopy, the expression of myosin/GFP chimeras, and subcellular fractionation, (iii) identification of proteins that interact with myosins using biochemical and molecular genetic approaches, (iv) creation of cell lines/animials that lack particular unconventional myosins using homologous recombination/ antisense RNA expression, and (v) characterization of these mutants using a variety of cell biological assays, quantitative video microscopy of cellular and intracellular motility, and transmission electron microscopy.
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Aggregated Dictyostelium cells stained for F-actin
(red) and myosin IC (green). Yellow indicates overlapping
localization. |
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Mel-c melanocyte treated with cytochalasin and stained
for F-actin (blue), microtubules (red), and the melanosome
marker TRP-1 (green). |
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Links
Questions, comments and suggestions about this page may be addressed to John Hammer
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