2015/05/31 by Hiroaki Ito, Yukinori Nishigami, Seiji Sonobe +1 · 13 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Chemistry · Engineering · Mathematics · Neuroscience · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Materials and Mechanics #Biochemistry #Biology #Biophysics #Cellular Mechanics and Interactions #Chemistry #Composite material #Contractility #Cortex (anatomy) #Curvature #Elasticity (physics) #Geometry #Lipid bilayer #Materials science #Mathematics #Membrane #Membrane curvature #Micro and Nano Robotics #Neuroscience #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.92.062711
published in Physical Review E 92(6), 062711 (American Physical Society) · 8 pages, 5 postscript figures
openalex publication_date 2015/12/21 · arxiv created 2016/11/05 · arxiv updated 2016/11/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Actomyosin actively generates contractile forces that provide the plasma membrane with the deformation stresses essential to carry out biological processes. Although the contractile property of purified actomyosin has been extensively studied, to understand the physical contribution of the actomyosin contractile force on a deformable membrane is still a challenging problem and of great interest in the field of biophysics. Here, we reconstitute a model system with a cell-sized deformable interface that exhibits anomalous curvature-dependent wrinkling caused by the actomyosin cortex underneath the spherical closed interface. Through a shape analysis of the wrinkling deformation, we find that the dominant contributor to the wrinkled shape changes from bending elasticity to stretching elasticity of the reconstituted cortex upon increasing the droplet curvature radius of the order of the cell size, i.e., tens of micrometers. The observed curvature dependence is explained by the theoretical description of the cortex elasticity and contractility. Our present results provide a fundamental insight into the deformation of a curved membrane induced by the actomyosin cortex.