Filament Nucleation Tunes Mechanical Memory in Active Polymer Networks
Abstract
Incorporating growth into contemporary material functionality presents a grand challenge in materials design. The F‐actin cytoskeleton is an active polymer network that serves as the mechanical scaffolding for eukaryotic cells, growing and remodeling in order to determine changes in cell shape. Nucleated from the membrane, filaments polymerize and grow into a dense network whose dynamics of assembly and disassembly, or “turnover,” coordinates both fluidity and rigidity. Here, the extent of F‐actin nucleation is varied from a membrane surface in a biomimetic model of the cytoskeleton constructed from purified protein. It is found that nucleation of F‐actin mediates the accumulation and dissipation of polymerization‐induced F‐actin bending energy. At high and low nucleation, bending energies are low and easily relaxed yielding an isotropic material. However, at an intermediate critical nucleation, stresses are not relaxed by turnover and the internal energy accumulates 100‐fold. In this case, high filament curvatures template further assembly of F‐actin, driving the formation and stabilization of vortex‐like topological defects. Thus, nucleation coordinates mechanical and chemical timescales to encode shape memory into active materials.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Sep 25, 2019
- Source ID
- 10.1002/adfm.201905243
Entities
People
- Alan Tabatabai
- David R. Kovar
- Deb S. Banerjee
- Michael Murrell
- Shiladitya Banerjee
- Taeyoon Kim
- Vikrant Yadav
Organizations
- Army Research Office
- Human Frontier Science Program
- National Institutes of Health
- Purdue University
- Royal Society
- Systems Biology Institute
- University College London
- University of Chicago
- Yale University