Controlling contractile instabilities in the actomyosin cortex
Abstract
The actomyosin cell cortex is an active contractile material for driving cell- and tissue morphogenesis. The cortex has a tendency to form a pattern of myosin foci, which is a signature of potentially unstable behavior. How a system that is prone to such instabilities can reliably drive morphogenesis remains an outstanding question. Here we report that in Caenorhabditis elegans zygote, feedback between active RhoA and myosin induces a contractile instability in the cortex. We discover that an independent RhoA pacemaking oscillator controls this instability, generating a pulsatory pattern of myosin foci and preventing the collapse of cortical material into a few dynamic contracting regions. Our work reveals how contractile instabilities that are natural to occur in mechanically active media can be biochemically controlled in order to robustly drive morphogenetic events.
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Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SPP 1782,GSC 97,GR 3271/2,GR 3271/3,GR 3271/4)
- Stephan W Grill
European Research Council (281903)
- Stephan W Grill
Human Frontier Science Program (RGP0023/2014)
- Stephan W Grill
European Commission (ITN grant - 281903)
- Stephan W Grill
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
- Stephan W Grill
European Commission (ITN grant - 641639)
- Stephan W Grill
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2017, Nishikawa et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Further reading
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- Neuroscience
- Physics of Living Systems
Recent experimental studies showed that electrically coupled neural networks like in mammalian inferior olive nucleus generate synchronized rhythmic activity by the subthreshold sinusoidal-like oscillations of the membrane voltage. Understanding the basic mechanism and its implication of such phenomena in the nervous system bears fundamental importance and requires preemptively the connectome information of a given nervous system. Inspired by these necessities of developing a theoretical and computational model to this end and, however, in the absence of connectome information for the inferior olive nucleus, here we investigated interference phenomena of the subthreshold oscillations in the reference system Caenorhabditis elegans for which the structural anatomical connectome was completely known recently. We evaluated how strongly the sinusoidal wave was transmitted between arbitrary two cells in the model network. The region of cell-pairs that are good at transmitting waves changed according to the wavenumber of the wave, for which we named a wavenumber-dependent transmission map. Also, we unraveled that (1) the transmission of all cell-pairs disappeared beyond a threshold wavenumber, (2) long distance and regular patterned transmission existed in the body-wall muscles part of the model network, and (3) major hub cell-pairs of the transmission were identified for many wavenumber conditions. A theoretical and computational model presented in this study provided fundamental insight for understanding how the multi-path constructive/destructive interference of the subthreshold oscillations propagating on electrically coupled neural networks could generate wavenumber-dependent synchronized rhythmic activity.