What is it about?
During evolution, insect have lost cytoplasmic intermediate filaments (cIFs). This is surprising, since cIFs (eg. Keratins, Vimentin) are very important in all other animals.
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Why is it important?
In humans, there is nearly 70 gened coding for cIFs and mutations in these genes are responsible for a vast numbet of diseases. Since there are so many, seemingly similar cIF genes, it has been difficult to accredit these genes with a universal function. Using a comparative biology approach, we are trying to find such a function.
Perspectives
This work nicely shows how you can look at a human problem through the eyes of Drosophila and also how evolutionary biology can be used to draw conclusions about human disease linked genes.
Josef Gullmets
University of Turku
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Internal epithelia inDrosophiladisplay rudimentary competence to form cytoplasmic networks of transgenic human vimentin, The FASEB Journal, August 2017, Federation of American Societies For Experimental Biology (FASEB),
DOI: 10.1096/fj.201700332r.
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