ArticleBiophysical journal2023
Branched actin cortices reconstituted in vesicles sense membrane curvature.
Article in Biophysical journal, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 40 citations in OpenAlex.
- Quantification of cholesterol incorporation in giant unilamellar vesicles produced by a modified cDICE method.Soft matter · 2026Article
- Tau-Driven Coordination of Microtubule-Actin Crosstalk in Cell-Sized Vesicles.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Strategy for Generating Giant Unilamellar Vesicles with Tunable Size Using the Modified cDICE Method.ACS synthetic biology · 2025Article
- Dynamic Plasma Membrane Topography Linked With Arp2/3 Actin Network Induction During Cell Shape Change.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
- Nuclear Assembly in Giant Unilamellar Vesicles Encapsulating Xenopus Egg Extract.Small (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2025Article
- Reconstituted systems for studying the architecture and dynamics of actin networks.The Biochemical journal · 2025Review
- Mitochondria- and ER-associated actin are required for mitochondrial fusion.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Active membrane deformations of a minimal synthetic cell.Nature physics · 2025Article
- Challenges in observing transcription-translation for bottom-up synthetic biology.QRB discovery · 2025Review
- Actin polymerization counteracts prewetting of N-WASP on supported lipid bilayers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Benefits and challenges of reconstituting the actin cortex.Cytoskeleton (Hoboken, N.J.) · 2024Review
- Centrosome-organized plasma membrane infoldings linked to growth of a cortical actin domain.The Journal of cell biology · 2024Article
- CK-666 and CK-869 differentially inhibit Arp2/3 iso-complexes.EMBO reports · 2024Article
- Mitochondria- and ER-associated actin are required for mitochondrial fusion.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Triacylglycerol-droplet-induced bilayer spontaneous curvature in giant unilamellar vesicles.Biophysical journal · 2024Article
- Synthetic control of actin polymerization and symmetry breaking in active protocells.Science advances · 2024Article
- Polysaccharide functionalization reduces lipid vesicle stiffness.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Artificial cells for in vivo biomedical applications through red blood cell biomimicry.Nature communications · 2024Review
- Degenerative and Regenerative Actin Cytoskeleton Rearrangements, Cell Death, and Paradoxical Proliferation in the Gills of Pearl Gourami (International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
- Membranes in focus.Biophysical journal · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The actin cortex is a complex cytoskeletal machinery that drives and responds to changes in cell shape. It must generate or adapt to plasma membrane curvature to facilitate diverse functions such as cell division, migration, and phagocytosis. Due to the complex molecular makeup of the actin cortex, it remains unclear whether actin networks are inherently able to sense and generate membrane curvature, or whether they rely on their diverse binding partners to accomplish this. Here, we show that curvature sensing is an inherent capability of branched actin networks nucleated by Arp2/3 and VCA. We develop a robust method to encapsulate actin inside giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) and assemble an actin cortex at the inner surface of the GUV membrane. We show that actin forms a uniform and thin cortical layer when present at high concentration and distinct patches associated with negative membrane curvature at low concentration. Serendipitously, we find that the GUV production method also produces dumbbell-shaped GUVs, which we explain using mathematical modeling in terms of membrane hemifusion of nested GUVs. We find that branched actin networks preferentially assemble at the neck of the dumbbells, which possess a micrometer-range convex curvature comparable with the curvature of the actin patches found in spherical GUVs. Minimal branched actin networks can thus sense membrane curvature, which may help mammalian cells to robustly recruit actin to curved membranes to facilitate diverse cellular functions such as cytokinesis and migration.
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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.