Filaments and Cellular Responses - Physics of Life

Filaments and Cellular Responses - Physics of Life: "Workshop overview: Life is inherently multiscaled ranging from molecules (nm) to 100m (trees) and from femtoseconds (chemical reactions) to millennia (evolution), covering around 27 orders of magnitude in total. This workshop addresses one aspect, namely filament assembly and their higher order organization.   In this workshop we will investigate self-assembly systems and their ability to scale from nanometer to metre in the structures they make and the cell systems they integrate. How these can be prefabricated and deployed within milliseconds to form a protective cage, or grow imperceptibly over many years through the careful addition of new subunits followed by their orchestrated cross-linking to form a nanocomposite like hair is a key research question.  Keratin intermediate filaments and their associated proteins are the key components, but the process of building the nanocomposite is unanswered   The role of non-globular domains and cation distribution along the polymer are key to filament assembly and then their scaling into higher order structures by bundling and interfilament organization.   Whilst hair is a very visible external example of keratin assembly, they are also key contributors to the mechanical stability of cells in our body.  Intermediate filaments anchor to cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix adhesion sites, connecting individual cells into a trans-cellular network spanning from nanometer to metre if the epidermis is considered as a continuum. Keratin mutations lead to reduced mechanical stability thereby resulting in blister formation as is the case in a diverse group of skin diseases, collectively called genodermatoses. The filaments are in continual flux, exchanging subunits along their length and changing their transcellular distribution according to their environment and age of the cell. Influencing filament dimensions at the nanometer scale is then amplified to the micrometer scale and beyond.  The molecular mechanisms responsible for the coordinated restructuring are still poorly understood and how other elements of the cytoskeleton that provide the molecular motors to facilitate these changes are only just being identified. This workshop will bring together those involved in modelling the non-globular domains/charge component and the dynamics of keratin filaments with those involved in the segmentation, analysis and generation of imaging data of filament assembly systems to review progress, current hypotheses and the orientation of the available and missing experimental tools to understand filament organization in cells and nanocomposites. "




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