Inhibition of Actin Dynamics in Cells

All chemicals and reagents were purchased from Sigma (St Louis, MO) unless otherwise stated. The BB94, Purvalanol A, FAK inhibitor II and PP2 compounds were all purchased from EMD BioSciences (La Jolla, CA). All drugs were soluble in DMSO, which was used as a control for all experiments. The BB94 and FAK inhibitor II were used at a final concentration of 5 µM, while Purvalanol A was used at 2 µM and PP2 was used at 10 µM. The Alexa Fluor 568 protein labeling kit used to label the gelatin matrix was purchased from Invitrogen (Eugene, OR), as were all cell culture reagents. Fugene 6 used for transfections was purchased from Roche Diagnostics (Indianapolis, IN). For dynamic visualization of actin, the LifeAct peptide (Riedl et al., 2008 (link)) was cloned into the previously described pLL 5.0 GFP Lenti-viral base vector (Wang & McNiven, 2012 (link)).