Congratulations to Ross Pedersen on his new paper “Type I myosins anchor actin assembly to the plasma membrane during clathrin-mediated endocytosis“, now published in the Journal of Cell Biology.
![](https://drubinbarneslab.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Pedersen-JCB-2019-1024x546.jpg)
Model for Myo5 function in anchoring actin assembly to the PM at endocytic sites. (A) Myo5 (yellow bananas) restricts activation of the Arp2/3 complex (gray avocados) by the WASP complex (blue widgets) to a discrete location, generating an actin array that grows predominantly in the same direction to generate force. (B) Absent this critical linkage, Arp2/3 activators splinter off of the PM, leading to Arp2/3 complex activation throughout the actin network. Delocalized Arp2/3 complex activation results in disordered actin arrays that fail to produce force. In the most catastrophic cases, the Arp2/3 complex and its activators pull away from the PM completely to form cytoplasmic actin comets (lower left of zoom).