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Getting to the heart of thick-filament structure

Thick filaments contain the protein myosin that generates the force of every heartbeat. Two studies report how these myosin molecules pack together in thick filaments with other proteins to form a surprisingly complex structure.
  1. Peter J. Knight

    1. Peter J. Knight is at the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology and the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.

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As you read these words, your beating heart is keeping you alive. No surprise, then, that researchers have sought for decades to understand the structures and mechanisms that underlie how the human heart functions, and to discover what changes in heart disease. The central players that make the heart a pump are the proteins actin and myosin, and these assemble into what are called thin and thick filaments, respectively. Thin filaments have a fairly simple structure that is well understood. Thick filaments are much more complex, and their structure has been difficult to determine. Writing in Nature, Dutta et al.1 and Tamborrini et al.2 report their use of the technique cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to reveal most of the structure of thick filaments in exquisite detail. These results reveal a structure that no one had predicted and that opens the door to a new world of experiment and understanding.

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Nature 623, 703-704 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03307-9

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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