The Inaugural Gary Borisy Lecture: Bruce Goode

Speaker: Bruce Goode, PhD, Professor of Biology, Brandeis University

Title: Multi-Component mechanism controlling cellular actin assembly and disassembly

This talk will focus on recent progress made in understanding how cells, in a matter seconds, dynamically assemble and turnover their actin cytoskeletons to alter cell shape and polarity, cell architecture, and intracellular traffic. Key to this progress has been the integration of classic genetic and biochemical studies with modern in vitro single molecule imaging of mechanisms in real time. This work reveals that actin networks are assembled by direct collaborations between different classes of actin nucleation and elongation factors, which in turn are spatially and temporally regulated by additional ligands. Once nucleated, filament growth continues to be regulated via a complex set of proteins that associate with barbed ends, dynamically interacting with each other and/or catalyzing each other’s displacement to tune filament growth. Finally, actin networks are dismantled, or turned over, but at drastically different speeds for different actin structures found in cells, with rates ranging from seconds, to minutes, to hours. Disassembly appears to be controlled by a core set of seven conserved proteins (Co- filin, Coronin, AIP1, Srv2/CAP, Twinfilin, GMF, and Abp1), which work together in multi-component mechanisms to influence actin disassembly in novel ways.

Reception to follow in Discovery Building Atrium