Muscular blob suggests new direction for tissue engineering

A quivering blob of muscle proteins in a Harvard lab could lead to controllable biomaterials to replace damaged body tissue.

Under a microscope, the "active gel" looks like a throbbing tangle of fibres immersed in jelly. Created by David Weitz and his colleagues at Harvard University, it is made from a molecular net of the muscle protein actin held into shape by another protein, filamin. Each actin strand has around 300 molecules of another muscle protein, myosin, attached.

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