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Pulsatile contractions and pattern formation in excitable actomyosin cortex

Michael F. Staddon, View ORCID ProfileEdwin M. Munro, View ORCID ProfileShiladitya Banerjee
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.22.432369
Michael F. Staddon
1Center for Systems Biology Dresden, Dresden, Germany
2Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany
3Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany
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Edwin M. Munro
4Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
5Institute for Biophysical Dynamics, University of Chicago, Chicago 60637, IL, USA
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Shiladitya Banerjee
6Department of Physics, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
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  • For correspondence: shiladtb@andrew.cmu.edu
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Abstract

The actin cortex is an active adaptive material, embedded with complex regulatory networks that can sense, generate, and transmit mechanical forces. The cortex exhibits a wide range of dynamic behaviours, from generating pulsatory contractions and travelling waves to forming organised structures. Despite the progress in characterising the biochemical and mechanical components of the actin cortex, the emergent dynamics of this mechanochemical system is poorly understood. Here we develop a reaction-diffusion model for the RhoA signalling network, the upstream regulator for actomyosin assembly and contractility, coupled to an active actomyosin gel, to investigate how the interplay between chemical signalling and mechanical forces regulate stresses and patterns in the cortex. We demonstrate that mechanochemical feedback in the cortex acts to destabilise homogeneous states and robustly generate pulsatile contractions. By tuning active stress in the system, we show that the cortex can generate propagating contraction pulses, form network structures, or exhibit topological turbulence.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted October 08, 2021.
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Pulsatile contractions and pattern formation in excitable actomyosin cortex
Michael F. Staddon, Edwin M. Munro, Shiladitya Banerjee
bioRxiv 2021.02.22.432369; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.22.432369
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Pulsatile contractions and pattern formation in excitable actomyosin cortex
Michael F. Staddon, Edwin M. Munro, Shiladitya Banerjee
bioRxiv 2021.02.22.432369; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.22.432369

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