Mechanobiology of Protein Droplets: Force Arises from Disorder

Timothy J Welsh; Yi Shen; Aviad Levin; Tuomas P J Knowles

doi:10.1016/j.cell.2018.11.020

Mechanobiology of Protein Droplets: Force Arises from Disorder

Cell. 2018 Nov 29;175(6):1457-1459. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.11.020.

Authors

Timothy J Welsh¹, Yi Shen¹, Aviad Levin¹, Tuomas P J Knowles²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK.
² Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK; Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, J J Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK. Electronic address: tpjk2@cam.ac.uk.

PMID: 30500530
DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.11.020

Abstract

The use of optogenetic approaches has revealed new roles for intracellular protein condensates described in two papers in this issue of Cell (Bracha et. al., 2018; Shin et al., 2018). These results show that growing condensates are able to exert mechanical forces resulting in chromatin rearrangement, establishing a new role for liquid-liquid phase separation in the mechanobiology of the cell.

Publication types

Comment

MeSH terms

Biophysics
Cytoplasm
Proteins*

Substances

Proteins

Grants and funding

203249/Z/16/Z/WT_/Wellcome Trust/United Kingdom