The Septin Circus: An Unforgettable Show of Cellular Choreography

The world we inhabit has long been home to an immense multitude of living beings: small bacteria and other microscopic organisms that elude our vision, as well as plants, fungi, and animals. Despite these vast differences in size and appearance, we classify all of these entities as living. Scientists, including the author of this thesis, have been captivated by the mechanisms that sustain the diversity of life, all while maintaining fundamental characteristics that define all this diversity of organisms as alive. At the basis of this remarkable diversity and functionality of life are cells. From single cells existing as unicellular organisms to multiple cells interacting to form multicellular organisms, cells are the minimum living building block of life. Cells between and even within single organisms are very diverse in shape, components, functionalities, and organization. Even with these differences, they all share common traits: cells have a cell membrane that separates their interior from their exterior, possess genetic material that contains all the information needed for the cell to function, they use components from their environment to fuel and renew themselves, and they are able to divide to reproduce. In order to carry out these functions: cells generate a multitude of components, proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, sugars, and other small metabolites, that are stored inside the cell, making it a complex self-sustaining chemical reactor with tens of thousands of interconnected and sometimes redundant reactions. Understanding how the basic commonalities between cells emerge from the intricate interaction of those reactions is the key to understand what is life and how it works...