About this Research Topic
The cytoskeleton is an essential component of cellular physiology across all organisms. To adapt to the plethora of cellular functions and geometries, two main mechanisms have driven evolution of the cytoskeleton across eukaryotes. One involves direct (and sometimes astonishingly rapid) changes to core cytoskeletal filament proteins such as actin, tubulins, intermediate filaments, and septins. Another involves the diversification of cytoskeleton-associated motors and regulatory proteins. Understanding these distinct mechanisms is crucial to determine how defects in cytoskeletal proteins result in disease and to expand our knowledge of how the cytoskeleton has evolved across divergent species.
Research into understanding the evolution of the cytoskeleton has undergone a revival over the past few years. This is partly due to cost-effective genome sequencing, allowing the community to explore divergent species and fill in key gaps in the evolutionary lineages of cytoskeletal proteins. Coupling this knowledge with efficient gene editing techniques has enabled effective interrogation of how cytoskeletal proteins from different organisms behave in vivo. These advances provide an opportunity to bring forward a collection of articles that focus on expanding our understanding of how the cytoskeleton has diversified to bring about essential cellular functions.
The aim of this Research Topic is to cover novel and exciting new trends describing how the cytoskeletal proteins have evolved and adapted to the diversity of cellular functions and geometries encountered in eukaryotes. Areas to be covered may include but are not limited to
• Structure and function of relatively divergent cytoskeletal proteins
• Novel mechanisms driving functional divergence of cytoskeletal proteins (synonymous substitutions, RNA localization, local translational regulation)
• Using heterologous expression to study similarity and differences in the function of cytoskeletal proteins
• Evolutionary analysis of cytoskeletal components
• Rapidly evolving cytoskeletal variants
Research into understanding the evolution of the cytoskeleton has undergone a revival over the past few years. This is partly due to cost-effective genome sequencing, allowing the community to explore divergent species and fill in key gaps in the evolutionary lineages of cytoskeletal proteins. Coupling this knowledge with efficient gene editing techniques has enabled effective interrogation of how cytoskeletal proteins from different organisms behave in vivo. These advances provide an opportunity to bring forward a collection of articles that focus on expanding our understanding of how the cytoskeleton has diversified to bring about essential cellular functions.
The aim of this Research Topic is to cover novel and exciting new trends describing how the cytoskeletal proteins have evolved and adapted to the diversity of cellular functions and geometries encountered in eukaryotes. Areas to be covered may include but are not limited to
• Structure and function of relatively divergent cytoskeletal proteins
• Novel mechanisms driving functional divergence of cytoskeletal proteins (synonymous substitutions, RNA localization, local translational regulation)
• Using heterologous expression to study similarity and differences in the function of cytoskeletal proteins
• Evolutionary analysis of cytoskeletal components
• Rapidly evolving cytoskeletal variants
Keywords: Cytoskeleton, actin, tubulin, septin, intermediate filaments, evolutionary adaptation, emerging model organisms, heterologous expression
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