Issue 255 / February 2023
On The End Of A Leash
It has been a long time since I saw a plug hanging from the side of a bathtub. Remember the small triangular ring the chain dangled from, and the actual plug at the other end - usually a piece of black and slimy rubber that fitted perfectly into the plug hole. As a child, the perfection of the fit used to fascinate me and I would sit in the bath, pulling the plug out and pushing it back in again, fighting against the swirl and dynamics of flowing water. The system is straightforward enough. If you do not want the bath to empty, take something large, strong and watertight to fill the hole. You may think we are the inventors of the plug, but we are not. Filamentous fungi have been using the same kind of approach for millions of years to obstruct large holes, or septal pores, whose role is to let cytosol migrate from one part of the fungus to another. Sometimes it is necessary to seal the pores off, however. This happens thanks to organelles known as Woronin bodies which, just like the bath plug, are tethered close by.
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Protein Spotlight (ISSN 1424-4721) is a monthly review written by the
Swiss-Prot team of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
Spotlight articles describe a specific protein or family of proteins on an informal tone. |