Figure 8.

Spectrin β enhances the adhesion between the plasma membrane and the actin cytoskeleton, stabilizing the inward protrusions in FCs. (a) Schematic diagram of the morphologies of the inward protrusions with (upper panel) and without (lower panel) local accumulation of spectrins near the base of the protrusions. (b) Spectrin β knock-down (KD) leads to the shrinkage of the protrusion length. (c) Spectrin β KD results in the reduction of the distance between neighbouring protrusions. (d) Spectrin β KD does not affect the protrusion radius. The measurements in (b–d) were performed on the electron micrographs published in [8,11]. The statistical significance (p-value) was calculated using a two-tailed non-parametric Mann–Whitney test. For wild-type (WT) cells, n = 9; for spectrin β knock-down cells, n = 5. (Online version in colour.)