Active morphodynamics of intracellular organelles in the trafficking pathway

TL;DR

This paper models the active morphodynamics of intracellular organelles, revealing how nonequilibrium fission and fusion processes drive their complex shapes and behaviors within the cell.

Contribution

It introduces a hydrodynamic framework linking active mechano-chemical cycles to organelle morphology and dynamics, a novel approach in cell biophysics.

Findings

Stable compartment drift emerges from active dynamics.

Ramified morphologies resemble Golgi structures.

Active stresses influence organelle-cytosol interactions.

Abstract

From the Golgi apparatus to endosomes, organelles in the endomembrane system exhibit complex and varied morphologies that are often related to their function. Such membrane-bound organelles operate far from equilibrium due to directed fluxes of smaller trafficking vesicles; the physical principles governing the emergence and maintenance of these structures have thus remained elusive. By understanding individual fission and fusion events in terms of active mechano-chemical cycles, we show how such trafficking manifests at the hydrodynamic scale, resulting not only in fluxes of material -- such as membrane area and encapsulated volume -- but also in active stresses that drive momentum transfer between an organelle and its cytosolic environment. Due to the fluid and deformable nature of the bounding membrane, this gives rise to novel physics, coupling nonequilibrium forces to organelle composition, morphology and hydrodynamic flows. We demonstrate how both stable compartment drift and ramified sac-like morphologies, each reminiscent of Golgi-cisternae, emerge naturally from the same underlying nonequilibrium dynamics of fission and fusion.