Berlin 2015 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 22: Posters: Cytoskeletal filaments
BP 22.19: Poster
Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 14:00–16:00, Poster A
Mechanical properties of branched actin filaments within lamellipodia — •Mohammadhosein Razbin1, Martin Falcke2, Panayotis Benetatos3, and Annette Zippelius1 — 1Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Selforganization, Am Fassberg 17 and Institute for Theoretical Physics, Georg August University, Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1, 37077 Göttingen, Germany; — 2Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Robert Rössle Str. 10, 13092 Berlin, and Dept. of Physics, Humboldt University, Newtonstr. 15, 12489 Berlin, Germany — 3Department of Physics, Kyungpook National University, 80 Daehakro, Bukgu, Daegu 702-701, Korea
Cell motility is a central process in wound healing, tumor metastasis and many other aspects of life. Moving cell on a 2-dimensional substrate generates different protrusions. One of the main protrusions, which has an important role in the motion is lamellipodia. The lamellipodia generates motion by polymerizing actin network. We investigate branched actin filaments polymerized by Arp2/3. The filaments are modeled as weakly bending wormlike filaments which are grafted at actin gel with finite stiffness and form branches at a given angle. We compute the thermal fluctuation of the endpoints and the resulting forces on the membrane. The forces are shown to depend sensitively not only on the persistence length but also on the geometry of the structure such as orientation and position of the branch point. Also, we have compared the network of the branched actin filaments and the network of the linear (unbranched) actin filaments in term of forces.