Filament Nucleation Tunes Mechanical Memory in Active Polymer Networks

• Published in: Advanced functional materials Vol. 29; no. 49
• Main Authors: Yadav, Vikrant, Banerjee, Deb S., Tabatabai, A. Pasha, Kovar, David R., Kim, Taeyoon, Banerjee, Shiladitya, Murrell, Michael P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Germany Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.12.2019
• Subjects: actin; Bending; Biomimetics; Computational fluid dynamics; defects; Dismantling; Filaments; Internal energy; Isotropic material; Materials science; Membranes; memory; Nucleation; Organic chemistry; Polymerization; Polymers; Scaffolding; Shape memory; turnover; nucleation; actin; memory; turnover; defects
• ISSN: 1616-301X; 1616-3028
• DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201905243

Incorporating growth into contemporary material functionality presents a grand challenge in materials design. The F‐actin cytoskeleton is an active polymer network that serves as the mechanical scaffolding for eukaryotic cells, growing and remodeling in order to determine changes in cell shape. Nucleated from the membrane, filaments polymerize and grow into a dense network whose dynamics of assembly and disassembly, or “turnover,” coordinates both fluidity and rigidity. Here, the extent of F‐actin nucleation is varied from a membrane surface in a biomimetic model of the cytoskeleton constructed from purified protein. It is found that nucleation of F‐actin mediates the accumulation and dissipation of polymerization‐induced F‐actin bending energy. At high and low nucleation, bending energies are low and easily relaxed yielding an isotropic material. However, at an intermediate critical nucleation, stresses are not relaxed by turnover and the internal energy accumulates 100‐fold. In this case, high filament curvatures template further assembly of F‐actin, driving the formation and stabilization of vortex‐like topological defects. Thus, nucleation coordinates mechanical and chemical timescales to encode shape memory into active materials. Structural and mechanical properties of reconstituted networks of protein polymers can be tuned by varying the amount of actin nucleator. Small and large concentrations of nucleators produce networks that relax easily, but at the intermediate levels of nucleation, long lived topological defects are formed.