Mechanical properties of chiral actin filaments

TL;DR

This paper presents a coarse-grained model of actin filaments that preserves helicity and chirality, enabling mesoscale simulations to study their mechanical properties and motor-driven dynamics, with results matching experimental observations.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel mesoscale simulation framework for chiral actin filaments that accurately predicts their shape, mechanics, and motor-driven behaviors, advancing computational cytoskeleton modeling.

Findings

Chiral actin filaments exhibit motor-driven chiral motion.

Motor torques induce filament rotation, coiling, and buckling.

The model matches experimental mechanical and dynamic behaviors.

Abstract

The mechanical properties of actin filaments are essential to their biological functions. Here, we introduce a highly coarse-grained model of actin filaments that preserves helicity and chirality while enabling mesoscale simulations. The framework is implemented in Cytosim, an open-source cytoskeleton simulation platform. We can predict and finely control the shape and mechanical properties of this helical filament, that can be matched to experimental values. Using this model, we investigated the role of filament chirality in motor-driven dynamics. We first show that in two different experimental configurations, motor movement along a helical filament results in a chiral motion of the filament. In a bundle of helical filaments, dimeric motors exert torques on each filament, inducing collective behaviors in the bundle such as rotation, coiling, and helical buckling, reminiscent of those observed in filopodia. Together, these results demonstrate the central role of helicity and chirality in actin mechanics and motor-driven dynamics, and establish our framework as a powerful tool for mesoscale simulations. This framework can also be used for other helical filaments beyond actin.