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Cytoplasmic movements outside the living cell

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology volume 18, page 406 (2017)Cite this article

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Inspired by the study of Allen and colleagues, who showed that cytoplasm from ruptured amoebae can continue to stream outside the living cell, Thompson and Wolpert devised a method to isolate cytoplasm from Amoeba proteus, which had the capacity to gel and undergo remarkably life-like movements outside the living cell! They used centrifugation to prepare concentrated cytoplasm from cells that had been chilled for 24 h. Movements began spontaneously when the extract was warmed to room temperature in the presence of ATP. Electron micrographs by their colleague E.H. Mercer showed that gelled extracts contained “spongy material and fibrils,” which they thought might be interchangeable (Wolpert, Thompson & O'Neill). Thompson and Wolpert noted “this system seems to offer a very favourable starting material for the study of the molecular basis of amoeboid movement.”

some were skeptical that anything could be learned about cellular movements after homogenizing cells

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References

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  1. Department of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology Yale University,

    Thomas D. Pollard

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  1. Thomas D. Pollard
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Correspondence to Thomas D. Pollard.

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Pollard, T. Cytoplasmic movements outside the living cell. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 18, 406 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm.2017.54

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