Chapter category:

A Brief History of the Coronin Family

This chapter appears in the following book:

The Coronin Family of Proteins

Edited by: Christoph Clemen, Ludwig Eichinger and Vasily Rybakin
ISBN: 978-0-387-09594-3
» Get more information about this book at landesbioscience.com «

Chapter authors:
Eugenio L. de Hostos

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What I’d like to do in this chapter is to share with you my recollections from the earliest days of coronin research and then to provide an overview of the still‑developing story of this fascinating family of proteins. In the fall of 1989 I arrived as a postdoc in Guenther Gerisch’s department at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich to start a project on actin‑binding proteins from Dictyostelium discoideum. Angelika Noegel (University of Cologne) and Michael Schleicher (University of Munich) had at the time their own subgroups in the Gerisch department that had done some beautiful work in this area. Schleicher’s approach had been to purify proteins that affected actin polymerization, primarily using falling‑ball viscometry and pyrene‑actin fluorimetry as assays. Noegel had led the molecular biology aspects of the projects, which involved the cloning of the genes and their inactivation by gene disruption followed by the analysis of the mutants. When I arrived in the lab, however, I found some general frustration with the fact that some of the proteins that had been purified based on dramatic effects on in vitro actin polymerization (e.g., severin) were at least partially redundant in Dictyostelium. Thus, the loss of the proteins did not have much of an effect on the cells and did not generate a phenotype that could shed some light on the biological function of the proteins.

Eugenio L. de Hostos
Molecular Imaging Program, Stanford University, School of Medicine

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Additional chapters from this book:

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Editorial:
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Chapter category:

A Brief History of the Coronin Family

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