It's always worth checking institutional sites to see what your peers are doing. For anyone with an interest in actin research, one to look at is the cell biology and cytoskeleton group of the Division of Hematology at Harvard Medical School, which boasts several acknowledged leaders in actin research, including Tom Stossel and John Hartwig. The site is essentially a departmental page, with information about staff contact details and seminar dates but will no doubt still interest the outside scientist for several reasons.

The most interesting section will probably be the Research Overview page. Covering topics such as actin crosslinking, cytoskeletal polymer physics and the genetics of motility, this gives not only a brief overview of the department's current projects but also gives an informative and colourful review of each subject. Some of these contain movies, which may take a while to download but allow the viewer to see some fascinating images, like a crawling neutrophil 'chasing' a bacterium. In this section, there is also an in-depth review on the biochemistry and biophysics of actin filaments.

Another section of interest is the Protocols page, which covers a wide range of tried and tested methods from 'The Very Basics' (such as precipitation of proteins) to more complex procedures used in biochemistry and cell biology research of the cytoskeleton. And with several direct links to the WWW.VirtualLibraryofCellBiology, the viewer has easy access to more basic tutorials, DNA and protein data bases and links to suppliers of scientific equipment and reagents, thus providing a handy resource for the cell biologist.