Bacterial genes and cell scaffolding

From Salt Lake City, Utah, at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology

While human bodies have skeletons of bones, our cells have a framework made of a filamentous network. The origin of this cytoskeleton has been a mystery to biologists because more-primitive cells, bacteria, seemed to lack anything resembling a cytoskeleton or its component proteins–tubulin and actin. Indeed, some researchers suggest that the cytoskeleton represents a fundamental difference between the cells of bacteria and those of animals, plants, and the other eukaryotes.