ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Actin filament curvature biases branching direction.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 91 papers.
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Who cites it
91 citing papers in PubMed, 182 citations in OpenAlex.
- Inorganic phosphate rapidly switches the stability of Arp2/3-induced actin branches.The Journal of cell biology · 2026Article
- Myosins 1e/f at the podosome base regulate podosome dynamics and promote macrophage migration.European journal of cell biology · 2025Article
- Bending the rules: curvature's impact on cell biology.BMC biology · 2025Review
- Dynamic clamping induces rotation-to-beating transition of pinned filaments in gliding assays.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Multiple Mechanisms to Regulate Actin Functions: "Fundamental" Versus Lineage-Specific Mechanisms and Hierarchical Relationships.Biomolecules · 2025Review
- Cracked actin filaments as mechanosensitive receptors.Biophysical journal · 2024Article
- Principles and regulation of mechanosensing.Journal of cell science · 2024Review
- Myosin forces elicit an F-actin structural landscape that mediates mechanosensitive protein recognition.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- CK-666 and CK-869 differentially inhibit Arp2/3 iso-complexes.EMBO reports · 2024Article
- Cryo-EM structures reveal how phosphate release from Arp3 weakens actin filament branches formed by Arp2/3 complex.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Biophysical Modeling of Actin-Mediated Structural Plasticity Reveals Mechanical Adaptation in Dendritic Spines.eNeuro · 2024Article
- Reconstitution of the transition from a lamellipodia- to filopodia-like actin network with purified proteins.European journal of cell biology · 2023Article
- Polymerization force-regulated actin filament-Arp2/3 complex interaction dominates self-adaptive cell migrations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Article
- Branched actin cortices reconstituted in vesicles sense membrane curvature.Biophysical journal · 2023Article
- Membrane tension induces F-actin reorganization and flow in a biomimetic model cortex.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Twist response of actin filaments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Bending actin filaments: twists of fate.Faculty reviews · 2023Review
- MICAL-mediated oxidation of actin and its effects on cytoskeletal and cellular dynamics.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2023Review
- Biochemical and mechanical regulation of actin dynamics.Nature reviews. Molecular cell biology · 2022Review
31 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mechanical cues affect many important biological processes in metazoan cells, such as migration, proliferation, and differentiation. Such cues are thought to be detected by specialized mechanosensing molecules linked to the cytoskeleton, an intracellular network of protein filaments that provide mechanical rigidity to the cell and drive cellular shape change. The most abundant such filament, actin, forms branched networks nucleated by the actin-related protein (Arp) 2/3 complex that support or induce membrane protrusions and display adaptive behavior in response to compressive forces. Here we show that filamentous actin serves in a mechanosensitive capacity itself, by biasing the location of actin branch nucleation in response to filament bending. Using an in vitro assay to measure branching from curved sections of immobilized actin filaments, we observed preferential branch formation by the Arp2/3 complex on the convex face of the curved filament. To explain this behavior, we propose a fluctuation gating model in which filament binding or branch nucleation by Arp2/3 occur only when a sufficiently large, transient, local curvature fluctuation causes a favorable conformational change in the filament, and we show with Monte Carlo simulations that this model can quantitatively account for our experimental data. We also show how the branching bias can reinforce actin networks in response to compressive forces. These results demonstrate how filament curvature can alter the interaction of cytoskeletal filaments with regulatory proteins, suggesting that direct mechanotransduction by actin may serve as a general mechanism for organizing the cytoskeleton in response to force.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.