Today scientists know that actin, a protein structure in the cell, and myosin, motors running on actin structures, produce the phenomena known as cytoplasmic streaming (CS). CS is the movement of vesicles, organelles, and other cargos through the cell. This movement has been observed for a long time, however, scientists wanted to isolate exactly which structures in the cell facilitated this movement. In order to know how something works in biology, it's broken, usually in one of two ways. Either add a drug/compound to disrupt the processes, or genetically modify a specific gene. In this case, scientists used the drug approach. There were three factors scientists believed may be associated with CS, Actin, microtubules, and protein synthesis. Drugs inhibiting each respective factor were introduced. CS stopped in the Actin trial only. To verify the other two factors weren't important for CS a mix of drugs was added and in both when the actin inhibitor was introduced, CS stopped.
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