Organization of Actin Meshworks in Cultured Cells: The Leading Edge
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
Since the early studies of Buckley and Porter (1967), Spooner et al. (1971), and others (see Goldman et al. 1976), it has been generally recognized that F-actin in cultured cells occurs in at least two distinguishable states of structural organization: in linear fibrillar bundles, normally recognizable in the light microscope and commonly referred to as “stress fibers,” and in meshworks or networks, confined to the motile lamella zones and ruffling membranes and thought to be generally present beneath the plasmalemma in a subcortical layer (Spooner et al. 1971; Goldman et al. 1976). In many subsequent studies the existence and general organization of the more obvious stress-fiber bundles, as well as the indentification of microfilaments within them as F-actin, have been exhaustively documented by both electron microscopy (Ishikawa 1974; Goldman et al. 1976) and particularly by immunofluorescence microscopy (for first reports, see Lazarides and Weber 1974; Lazarides 1976a,b). In contrast, the...
