Buzz Baum

..New insights may be gained from the recent identification of a conserved cofilin phosphatase, Slingshot, which modulates actin dynamics to help control Drosophila wing hair morphogenesis...

..Here we identify Moesin as a key player. Moesin is the sole Drosophila member of the ERM proteins, which, once activated via phosphorylation, crosslink actin filaments to the cytoplasmic tails of plasma membrane proteins...

..In several animals, microtubule-based structures are thought to be the source of chiral information used to establish handedness. Now, two new studies in Drosophila identify a role for unconventional myosin motors in this process...

..A recent study has now identified in Spire a third class of actin nucleator. The four short WH2 repeats within Spire bind four consecutive actin monomers to form a novel single strand nucleus for 'barbed end' actin filament elongation...

..Two recent studies help show how this is achieved during convergence and extension of the Drosophila germ-band, where polarity within the plane of the embryonic epithelium biases junction remodeling to polarize cell intercalation...

....

..Significantly, the intermittent signaling induced by these filopodial dynamics generates a type of structured noise that is uniquely suited to the generation of well-ordered, tissue-wide epithelial patterns...

..FLIGHT integrates RNAi screen data with microarray gene expression as well as genomic annotations and genetic/physical interaction datasets to provide a single interface for RNAi screen analysis and data-mining in Drosophila...

..These data reveal a role for Tao-1 in controlling the dynamic interplay between microtubule plus ends and the actin cortex in the regulation of cell form...

..However, to date, most RNAi screens have been performed in a single cell line, and results then extrapolated across cell types and systems...

..To delineate the pathways controlling this process, we screened a genome-scale, image-based Drosophila RNA interference dataset for double-stranded RNAs that reduce the average size of adherent S2R+ cells...

....

..SCAR and WASP then activate the Arp2/3 complex to nucleate the formation of new actin filaments, which through polymerization exert a protrusive force on the membrane...

....

..Thus, intermittent protrusion-based signalling has the potential to yield robust self-organizing tissue-wide patterns without the need to invoke diffusion-mediated signalling...

..New studies of moesin function during Drosophila oogenesis show that Dmoesin tethers actin to the oocyte membrane. Interestingly, Dmoesin and an intact cortex are also required to stabilise ooycte polarity...

..We propose that after NEBD, completion of centrosome separation and positioning around chromosomes depends on astral microtubule connections to a moving cell cortex...

..Here, we discuss this recent work and the possible role of crosstalk between the mitotic actin cortex and the plus ends of astral microtubules in this process...

....

..A new study reveals how an extracellular protein--Spam--helps mechanosensory organs in the fruit fly to withstand the effects of the water loss that accompanies heat shock...

..In this review, we discuss the common molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in EMT in both cases...

..These include techniques for growing and maintaining cell lines, transient and stable transfection, RNA interference, imaging, immunostaining, fluorescence-activated cell sorting, and for the isolation of RNA and protein from fly cells...

..We propose a new, cascade pathway model of filopodia regulation in which SCAR signals to lamellipodia and then filopodia arise from lamellipodia in response to additional signal(s)...

..These studies identify Capulet as part of an emerging pathway linking guidance signals to regulation of cytoskeletal dynamics and suggest that the Abl pathway mediates signals downstream of multiple Roundabout receptors...

..Cnn is phosphorylated during mitosis in a Polo-dependent manner, suggesting that the Polo-dependent phosphorylation of Cnn initiates centrosome maturation in flies...

....

....

....