Regensburg 2019 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 8: Cytoskeletal filaments
BP 8.1: Talk
Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 09:30–09:45, H10
The influence of vimentin on actin dynamics — •Zahra Mostajeran1, Emmanuel Terriac1, and Franziska Lautenschläger1,2 — 1INM-Leibniz Institute for New Materials, Saarbrücken, Germany — 2Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
The cytoskeleton is a network of polymers which extends inside the cytoplasm to form and maintain the cell shape. It is composed of three main types of filaments: microtubules (MTs), actin filaments, and intermediate filaments (IFs). Vimentin belongs to the family of IFs and is involved in fixing organelles in the cytoplasm and regulating the direction of cell migration. It forms non-polar filaments and has therefore no known molecular motor directly interacting on it. Vimentin is linked via plectin protein cross-linker to MTs and actin filaments as well as to itself. Vimentin has been shown to colocalize to actin stress fibers (SFs). These are bundles of actin filaments assembled by the molecular motors and crosslinker proteins. Actin SFs play a key role in cell contractility and cell migration. We investigate the effect of vimentin in processes like cell migration and traction forces which are known to be initiated by forces generated by actin filaments and the molecular motor myosin. To understand how vimentin IFs are involved in these processes, we study the dynamics of the actin SFs on cells with different amounts of vimentin. We also consider the role of plectin on our results. We demonstrate that actin SFs are less dynamic in vimentin depleted cells compared to vimentin wild-type cells. We could further show that the dynamics of actin SFs is not influenced by plectin, suggesting a role of vimentin itself on actin SF dynamics.