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.
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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).