The nuclear lamina in Heidelberg and Wurzburg: a personal view

This article is dedicated to Werner W. Franke on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Werner Franke introduced us into the research on the nuclear envelope at a time when we were members of his laboratory. In this article we shall focus on one structure of the nuclear envelope, the nuclear lamina, that had attracted us from the beginning. We have not intended to write a comprehensive review on lamins and the nuclear lamina but wanted to summarize some of the lamin data that had been generated in Werner Franke's group and later in our own laboratories during the last nearly thirty years.