8. Conclusions
The nuclear lamina cannot be viewed merely as the ‘nuts and bolts’ of nuclear structure. Although the lamina is certainly an essential structural element in the nucleus, the increasing evidence for human ‘laminopathy’ diseases suggests that some lamin-associated proteins have highly specialized, and in some cases possibly tissue-specific, functions. Recent studies suggest that activities such as transcription repression, growth control and apoptotic signaling each depend on the dynamic assembly of lamin-based structures. These findings join previous work showing that the lamina is essential for DNA replication. The evolutionary view suggests that metazoan evolution has been accompanied by an expansion in the number and ‘flavors’ of nuclear lamins and lamin-binding proteins. Thus, more lamin-associated proteins will probably emerge, including new and known proteins whose functions are finally linked to a 3D context within the nucleus.
Acknowledgments
We thank biomedical illustrator M. Linkinhoker for rendering Fig. 1 and Fig. 5; H. Cedar, C. Machamer, A. Simon, D. Shumaker and J. Liu for useful discussions and comments on the manuscript; and A. Simon for sharing results before publication. This work was supported by grants from the USA–Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) #125/98 and the German–Israel Foundation (GIF) #1-573-036.13 (to Y.G.), and by grants from the W.W. Smith Charitable Trust and NIH-RO1GM48646 (to K.L.W.).