F-actin bundles,
building blocks of cells’ structures,
I bend and buckle.

José Alvarado

AMOLF, Amsterdam

I work with actin, a protein that cells use for mechanical structures
just as an engineer would use steel to make a skyscraper or a car. In
my Master’s project, I took reconstituted filamentous actin bundles
and performed mechanical experiments on them using
myosin-functionalized beads in an optical tweezer setup in order to
investigate their material properties.