The knee-jerk for many of us raised on the Western blot loading control is actin, but biologically speaking, it's far from it...
But surely not everything in the cell is such a barrel of monkeys?????
What's your pick for the cell's most boring molecule?
(Video is from Michael Way's lab. Even boring molecules do cool things when viruses are in the house!)
Podcast
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Wait, Bayman, you suck up to me in the other comments section and then make another post putting down actin? Well I guess you are half-apologising, but still.
None of Bayblab's precious cancer research could be done without actin. endocytosis? vesicle trafficking? cell movement? Cells are just boring bags of cytoplasm without actin.
Finally, if you really want to see some pretty actin tails, check out Rickettsia. much nicer than listeria or those boring, possibly extracellular, vaccinia tails. http://iai.asm.org/cgi/content/full/68/8/4706
Here are some other movies from my PI's lab: http://mcb.berkeley.edu/labs/welch/videos.html
My pick for most boring molecule? Anything that's called a " ____ kinase kinase". ugh. can't cells just streamline their signaling pathways already?
: ) Thanks for saying you're sorry.
I'd have to agree with Shawna, cell signalling is the most boring subject in cell biology. There are of course exception, but if you've spent your entire PhD studying ONE residue of a X-kinase-kinase-kinase doing in-vitro auto-phosphorylation assays and cloned 92 different point mutations, I feel bad for you.
Also a couple of cheap shots:
Metabolism enzymes, and chief amongst these BHMT.
Garbage disposal, for example anything involving ubiquitin.
Heat-shock proteins....
I could go on ;)
Post-translational histone modifications!!!! I mean come on, don't you think if there was a histone code we would have found it already?? Trying to derive meaning from an infinite number of combinations of different post-translational modification at thousads to millions of sites across the genome?? That's loony tunes.
SETI has a better chance of finding alien messages encoded in radio waves from other galaxies. And if you're looking for entertainment, the daVinci Code is a way better read...
It's like the phosphorylation code with the added complexity of additional modifications, There are too many variables, too many proteins involved and the effects are very local. But other than a few key modifications, like say a transcriptional start site signal, the other ones appear to be fine tuning at best, or just an artifact of packaging at worst. The proof is in pudding: yeast live happily without histone tails.
Most boring molecule in the cell... water? oxygen? .. possibly.,, certainly not any protein that has evolved for millions of years.
Actin is a perfectly fine-tuned protein that fulfills the important function of cellular loading control.
BHMT-2 is infinitely more boring than BHMT.
I'm just sayin'.
"if you've spent your entire PhD studying ONE residue of a X-kinase-kinase-kinase doing in-vitro auto-phosphorylation assays and cloned 92 different point mutations, I feel bad for you."
92 point mutations? For one residue? That sounds like a lot of overkill (or somebody who doesn't know math)
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