Departments of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology and Cell Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA. thomas.pollard@yale.edu
Several new studies have used RNA interference to screen for protein functions affecting cell shape, mitosis and cytokinesis of Drosophila cells in culture. One broad survey of nearly 1,000 proteins and three studies focused on cytoskeletal and motor proteins have identified key proteins essential for these processes in animal cells.