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Morphology And Mechanics Of The Actin Cytoskeleton, David Aaron Quint

Physics - Dissertations

Contained in this thesis is the quest to model the growth, form and mechanics of part of the cellular cytoskeleton known as the lamellipodium. The cellular cytoskeleton is made of filamentous proteins, such as F-actin, and provides for structural support for the cell. Lamellipodia are extensions of the cellular cytoskeleton at the leading edge of a crawling cell generated so that the cell can extend, and thereby move in a particular direction. In the first two chapters, we focus on morphological characteristics of lamellipodia formation, which is, in part, shaped by branched filament nucleation via the branching protein Arp2/3. For …