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Hair, nails, and horns, all made up of keratin, are some of the hardest and most resilient structures in animals. Inside zebrafish cells, keratin plays a distinct role, giving them the strength they need to move together as a coherent tissue while modulating the driving forces behind their movement during early development. But what happens when keratin is missing? A new study from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), published in Nature Communications, reveals how crucial this protein is for life itself.
The British developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert once said that the most important event in life is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation. That may sound exaggerated, but scientifically speaking, it is not far from the truth. During this stage, the cells of a young embryo reorganize and form the three germ layers from which all tissues and organs will eventually arise.
Researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)—the Heisenberg group and Edouard Hannezo—together with colleagues from Sorbonne Université and Leiden University, have now uncovered why the structural protein keratin plays such an essential part in this process.
