Actin Polymerization/Depolymerization Assay Kit (Fluorometric), BioVision Inc.

The kit to study and quantitate the effect of different compounds, proteins and tissue extracts on actin polymerization and/or depolymerization.

• Evaluation of critical concentrations of actin polymerization in different conditions
• The assay is simple, high- throughput compatible and can be completed in less than three hours

Actin, a highly conserved and abundant protein in eukaryotic cells, is one of the major components of cytoskeleton. It can be found as monomeric globular protein, called G actin or it can polymerize into filamentous actin, named F actin.

Actin plays major roles in cell division, cell motility, cell signaling, organelle movement, etc. Mammals have 6 isoforms of Actin, which can be divided into three classes, α, β and γ. Muscle Actin is α class and all other non-muscle actins belong to β and γ classes.

Understanding the effect of different drugs, proteins on actin polymerization and depolymerization is very important for understanding cellular machinery, more importantly because Cytoskeleton is a very important target for cancer therapy.

The kit utilizes a proprietary pyrene-labeled actin molecule that develops a higher fluorescent signal if it undergoes polymerization. The signal can be easily detected using a fluorescence microplate reader.