ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Extensile to contractile transition in active microtubule-actin composites generates layered asters with programmable lifetimes.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 45 citations in OpenAlex.
- Contractile to extensile transitions and mechanical adaptability enabled by activity in cytoskeletal structures.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Bottom-Up Synthesis and Active Assembly of DNA Networks by Biomolecular Nanomachines.Small (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2026Article
- Mechanosensitive feedback organizes cell shape and motion during hindbrain neuropore morphogenesis.Current biology : CB · 2026Article
- Dissecting cytoskeletal crosstalk through reconstituted actin-microtubule systems.Molecular biology of the cell · 2026Review
- Morphodynamics of surface-attached active drops.Nature communications · 2026Article
- BARCODE: high throughput screening and analysis of soft active materials.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Active membrane deformations of a minimal synthetic cell.Nature physics · 2025Article
- Microscopic interactions control a structural transition in active mixtures of microtubules and molecular motors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Kinesin and myosin motors compete to drive rich multiphase dynamics in programmable cytoskeletal composites.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Self-mixing in microtubule-kinesin active fluid from nonuniform to uniform distribution of activity.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Cross-linker design determines microtubule network organization by opposing motors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Quantifying Cytoskeleton Dynamics Using Differential Dynamic Microscopy.Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE · 2022Article
- Biotropic liquid crystal phase transformations in cellulose-producing bacterial communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Active Microphase Separation in Mixtures of Microtubules and Tip-Accumulating Molecular Motors.Physical review. XArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
We study a reconstituted composite system consisting of an active microtubule network interdigitated with a passive network of entangled F-actin filaments. Increasing the concentration of filamentous actin controls the emergent dynamics, inducing a transition from turbulent-like flows to bulk contractions. At intermediate concentrations, where the active stresses change their symmetry from anisotropic extensile to isotropic contracting, the composite separates into layered asters that coexist with the background turbulent fluid. Contracted onion-like asters have a radially extending microtubule-rich cortex that envelops alternating layers of microtubules and F-actin. These self-regulating structures undergo internal reorganization, which appears to minimize the surface area and maintain the ordered layering, even when undergoing aster merging events. Finally, the layered asters are metastable structures. Their lifetime, which ranges from minutes to hours, is encoded in the material properties of the composite. These results challenge the current models of active matter. They demonstrate self-organized dynamical states and patterns evocative of those observed in the cytoskeleton do not require precise biochemical regulation, but can arise from purely mechanical interactions of actively driven filamentous materials.
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