Turn-on protein switches for controlling actin binding in cells

Unyime M. Effiong, Hannah Khairandish, Isabela Ramirez-Velez, Yanran Wang and Brian Belardi ()
Additional contact information
Unyime M. Effiong: The University of Texas at Austin
Hannah Khairandish: The University of Texas at Austin
Isabela Ramirez-Velez: The University of Texas at Austin
Yanran Wang: The University of Texas at Austin
Brian Belardi: The University of Texas at Austin

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: Abstract Within a shared cytoplasm, filamentous actin (F-actin) plays numerous and critical roles across the cell body. Cells rely on actin-binding proteins (ABPs) to organize F-actin and to integrate its polymeric characteristics into diverse cellular processes. Yet, the multitude of ABPs that engage with and shape F-actin make studying a single ABP’s influence on cellular activities a significant challenge. Moreover, without a means of manipulating actin-binding subcellularly, harnessing the F-actin cytoskeleton for synthetic biology purposes remains elusive. Here, we describe a suite of designed proteins, Controllable Actin-binding Switch Tools (CASTs), whose actin-binding behavior can be controlled with external stimuli. CASTs were developed that respond to different external inputs, providing options for turn-on kinetics and enabling orthogonality and multiplexing. Being genetically encoded, we show that CASTs can be inserted into native protein sequences to control F-actin association locally and engineered into structures to control cell and tissue shape and behavior.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49934-2 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:15:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-024-49934-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-49934-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().