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building artificial cells to mimick the mechanical properties of cell cortex

Tian Zhi Luo's picture

The composite of the actin cytoskeleton and plasma membrane plays important roles in many biological events. Here, we employed the emulsion method to synthesize artificial cells with biomimetic actin cortex in vesicles and characterized their mechanical properties. We demonstrated that the emulsion method provides the flexibiligy to adjust the lipid composition and protein concentrations in artificial cells to achieve the desired size distribution, internal microstructure and mechanical properties. Moreover, comparison of the cortical elasticity measured for reconstituted artificial cells to that of real cells, including those manipulated useing genetic depletion and pharmacological inhibition, strongly supports that actin cytoskeletal proteins are dominant over lipid molecules in cortical mechanics. Our study indicates that the assembly of biological systems in artificial cells with purified cellular components provides a powerful way to anwer biological quesitions.

Our new results have been published in Applied Physics Letters 104, 153701 (2014). We hope that this piece of work will inspire more effort in biomimetic studies.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4871861

 or

scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/apl/104/15/10.1063/1.4871861

 

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