David M Altman

The inside of a cell is crowded and highly organized. It is because of its ordered state that a cell is a dynamic and exciting environment. Molecular motors are the biomolecules that generate force and motion, and thus do the work that is necessary to maintain the cell’s organization. Research in my lab seeks to understand how the molecular motor myosin functions in the cell by taking a two-fold approach. The first approach is to study myosins outside of the cell (in vitro). This allows us to reduce the complexity of the experimental system, but we must take the results from these experiments and extrapolate in order to understand how the motor actually functions inside the cell. The second approach we take is to study myosins inside the cell (in vivo). This means that the system is more complicated, with many other biomolecules complicating our experiment, but it also means that it is easier to understand the physiological relevance. We conduct studies at a variety of size scales, ranging from studies of individual purified motors (1 billionth of a meter) to single cells (1 millionth of a meter) to muscle fibers (1 thousandth of a meter).