Cytoskeleton club Antony Lee - Institut Curie, Paris - "Self-organized chiral helical beating of actin bundles driven by myosin X motors"

Antony Lee - Institut Curie, Paris

Title: Self-organized chiral helical beating of actin bundles driven by myosin X motors

Abstract:
Biological systems can self-organize at large scales by coordinating small constituents that each consume energy from the environment. In this talk, I will describe a minimal molecular system in which myosin molecular motors and polymerizing actin filaments self-organize in vitro into polar bundles that exhibit spontaneous wave-like beating, resembling the flagellar beat of eukaryotic cells. Despite their contrasting biophysical properties, myosin-II, myosin-V and myosin-X produce wave-like beating with similar waveforms. By nucleating actin polymerization from microbeads rather than from the surface of a patterned glass coverslip (as in earlier experiments), we achieved conditions where the filament-motor system was allowed to beat in 3D.
Remarkably, 3D beating bundles driven by myosin-X display chiral helical waves of bending and torsional deformation. This new geometry also allowed us to study the interactions between neighboring beads via their "tentacles", which resulted in effective attraction forces and bead clustering.

Invited by Aurélie Bertin