Tiny proteins "squeeze" cells like balloons

By bending the cytoskeleton inward to a tight point in the center, a cell splits into two—much like you make balloon animals by twisting

Their research results were supported by the European Research Council and the Wellcome Trust and were published in the journal eLife.

All living things are made up of cells, which are surrounded by a fragile and flexible membrane, like a balloon

During cell division, the cell produces a cell dynamic loop along the center of the surrounding membrane, which is a machine composed of actin and motor protein called myosin

So far, it has been thought that when cells are squeezed tighter, the actin filaments that make up the cell's power loop will divide

This may indicate that "curl" plays a key role in the cell dynamics loop shrinking tight enough to divide cells

More than 20 years ago, Professor Mohan Balasubramanian, one of the main authors of the study, discovered Rng2, which is an important protein in this process, but until now, researchers have made amazing observations: It can convert actin The wire is bent into an actual loop

Dr.

"As far as we know, no other protein does this kind of work on individual filaments

The researchers used a method called refactoring, in which they decomposed a complex system into its components and then reassembled it to find out the role played by each individual element

In this research funded by the European Research Council and the Wellcome Foundation, they created a lipid bilayer to represent the cell membrane and experimented with adding different proteins to it.

It opens up the possibility of using "curls" as a tool to design cells of different shapes

Dr.

"This can help us really understand how curved actin deforms cell membranes, or whether cells use this mechanism to control certain processes

Journal Reference :

1. Saravanan Palani, Sayantika Ghosh, Esther Ivorra-Molla, Scott Clarke, Andrejus Suchenko, Mohan K Balasubramanian, Darius Vasco Köster.