Regensburg 2022 – scientific programme

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SYSM: Interplay of Substrate Adaptivity and Wetting Dynamics from Soft Matter to Biology

SYSM 1: Interplay of Substrate Adaptivity and Wetting Dynamics from Soft Matter to Biology

SYSM 1.4: Invited Talk

Wednesday, September 7, 2022, 16:45–17:15, H1

Elastocapillary phenomena in cells — •Roland L. Knorr — Interfacial Cell Biology Lab, Integrative Research Institute for the Life Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany — Graduate School and Faculty of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Japan

Compartmentalisation is essential for eukaryotic cell function, allowing the division of processes into membrane-bound, specialised compartments, such as organelles. In recent years, intracellular phase separation has garnered much attention as a non-membrane means of organising components through the formation of droplet-like compartments, which are functionally implicated in both health and disease. Evidence suggests that droplet clearance involves autophagy, a highly-conserved cellular recycling system in which membrane sheets expand and bend to isolate and degrade portions of the cell interior.

Here, we investigate the mechanisms of droplet sequestration by membrane sheets in both living and synthetic cells. A minimal theoretical model shows that the surface tension of wetting droplets determines whether membrane sheets isolate the droplet phase in a whole or piecemeal fashion. We also find that wetting droplet induce local membrane spontaneous curvature changes, resulting in the reversal of the bending direction of membrane sheets and, thus, in cytosol sequestration [Nature 2020, 2021]. Further, we demonstrate that the morphogenesis of protein storage vacuoles in plants underlies similar physical principles [PNAS, JCB 2021]. I propose that droplet-mediated autophagy and vacuole remodelling represent a novel class of cellular processes driven by elastocapillary.