Regensburg 2013 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 25: Posters: Cytoskeleton
BP 25.11: Poster
Wednesday, March 13, 2013, 17:30–19:30, Poster C
Keratin 8/18 Networks and their Interplay with Plectin — •Ines Martin1, Soufi Nafeey2, Tobias Paust1, Michael Beil3, Harald Herrmann4, and Othmar Marti1 — 1Department of Experimental Physics, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany — 2Central Facility of Electron Microscopy, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany — 3Clinic of Internal Medicine I, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany — 4Division of Molecular Genetics, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany
The keratin 8/18 dimer is a structural building block of intermediate filaments (IFs), which are basic constituents of the cytoskeleton in some epithelial cells. They are responsible for the stiffness of cells and responses to mechanical stimuli. Keratin filaments can be crosslinked by plectin, a protein that links different parts of the cytoskeleton to each other as well as to hemidesmosomes.
In this work we assembled keratin 8/18 and plectin together in vitro to form crosslinked networks. We checked the resulting networks with Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Immuno-Gold-Labeling and were able to identify the position of plectin molecules. The viscoelastic network properties were measured by passive microrheology and compared to in vitro assembled networks without crosslinker and with MgCl2 as crosslinker.