New jobs for the actin cytoskeleton in morphogenesis: Stress resistance in early embryos

My lab is interested in a fundamental question: How does the actin cytoskeleton drive changes in cell shape, particularly during embryonic morphogenesis? Actin filaments and their associated proteins are the bones that give cells their shape. But we would like to extend our understanding beyond a list of proteins to know how the actin cytoskeleton governs whole-cell properties of cell shape change like dynamics and robustness. The holistic understanding we want demands that we look upstream and downstream of actin to learn how it interacts with sub-systems throughout the cell, such as genes in the nucleus and membranes at the cell surface.