In this paper, the author reviews recently published videos that depict the roles played by myosin II in contraction of the cortical ring during cellularization and cytokinesis in early development (Royou et al., 2004), by spindle and astral microtubules in regulating the formation of cleavage furrows during the cleavage of primary spermatocytes…

Neutrophils are white blood cells specialized for scavenging cellular debris and consuming infectious microorganisms in a process called "phagocytosis." What seems to make neutrophils especially voracious is the presence of antibodies (or opsonins) coating the surface of foreign cells. Recently, Dewitt and Hallett (2002) examined the role of…

Some impressive video movies have appeared as supplemental material in recent issues of the "Journal of Cell Biology (JCB)", and in this article, the author reviews several of them. In general, the JCB format provides each video clip with its own caption, in addition to any contextual references in the article itself, and a separate descriptive…

In this article, the author reviews videos from "Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBC)" depicting various aspects of plasma membrane (PM) dynamics, including the targeting of newly synthesized components and the organization of those PM invaginations called caveolae. The papers accompanying these videos describe, respectively, the constitutive…

These days, all introductory biology students know that sliding filaments of myosin and actin cause muscle contraction. Moreover, cell biology students learn that there are more ubiquitous, less specialized forms of cell motility than what is evident in contracting muscle cells. Increasingly, it seems that actin is involved in a wider variety of…

Most science students readily understand that following fertilization, a single-celled egg must undergo multiple rounds of cell division to become a multicellular organism. This transformation is so universal among animal embryos that developmental biologists refer to the process with a single term: ''gastrulation.'' During gastrulation, many if…