An actin mesh (left) collapses in response to activated rho (right).
HALL
It pays to have a back-up project in case your main research stalls. That's what Alan Hall (now at University College London) and colleagues learned when they set aside their studies on the protein ras and switched to its cousin rho. Their work (starting with Paterson et al., 1990) revealed that rho and related proteins were key regulators of the cell's actin cytoskeleton, and it set the stage for experiments that implicated the protein family in everything from cell cycle control to contraction of arteries.
Hall's team had been struggling to decipher the function of the oncogene ras by injecting its protein into cultured cells. Newly available recombinant rho allowed them to apply the same technique to investigate rho's impact. Post-doc Pascal Madaule of Columbia University (New York, NY) had stumbled on...
