Motility and deformations of chemically active vesicles in reactant fields - Maitane Muñoz-Basagoiti (ISTA, Austria)

The plasma membrane, which separates the interior of the cell from its surroundings, plays a central role in mediating the interactions between a cell and its environment. When exposed to chemical fields, active proteins on the plasma membrane can generate local forces on its surface. While these forces have been shown to enhance membrane fluctuations in theory and experiment, their potential to generate large-scale cell deformations remains largely unexplored — and the regulation of cell shape mainly attributed to the cell cytoskeleton. Here we hypothesise that the chemical reactivity of the plasma membrane can serve as an alternative mechanism for mesoscale cell shape generation. By introducing a computational coarse-grained model where a chemically reactive fluid membrane is exposed to an explicit field of reactant particles, we show the emergence of membrane protrusions as a function of environmental reactant concentration and rates of energy-dissipating reactions on the membrane. Our results open the door to exploring the connection between cell shape and metabolic symbioses, where organisms communicate through the exchange of reactants.

Contact: Simon Gravelle