The cells that swim in the ocean , live in the ground, float in the air, and make up human tissue come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and stiffnesses that are integral to their biological functions and survival. In the early 1900s, biologists began to investigate the amazing deformations that some cells could undergo. They hypothesized that the mechanical properties of those cells are generated by a specific scaffolding of subcellular components, which was termed the cytoskeleton by Paul Wintrebert in 1931. A great deal of effort since then has produced a catalog of proteins that make up the cytoskeleton in eukaryotes—organisms, including humans and yeast, that compartmentalize their DNAinto a nucleus. Those proteins self-assemble into an amazingly active material that is responsible for many of the animated motions associated with life.
The cytoskeleton of every eukaryotic cell is made up of two general classes of proteins: long...
