Arrested in Glass: Actin within Sophisticated Architectures of Biosilica in Sponges
[ 1 ] Instytut Technologii i Inżynierii Chemicznej, Wydział Technologii Chemicznej, Politechnika Poznańska | [ P ] employee
2022
scientific article
english
- actin
- biological materials
- biomineralization
- biosilica
- sponges
EN Actin is a fundamental member of an ancient superfamily of structural intracellular proteins and plays a crucial role in cytoskeleton dynamics, ciliogenesis, phagocytosis, and force generation in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes. It is shown that actin has another function in metazoans: patterning biosilica deposition, a role that has spanned over 500 million years.Species of glass sponges (Hexactinellida) and demosponges (Demospongiae), representatives of the first metazoans, with a broad diversity of skeletal structures with hierarchical architecture unchanged since the late Precambrian, are studied. By etching their skeletons, organic templates dominated by individual F-actin filaments, including branched fibers and the longest, thickest actin fiber bundles ever reported, are isolated. It is proposed that these actin-rich filaments are not the primary site of biosilicification, but this highly sophisticated and multi-scale form of biomineralization in metazoans is patterned.
2105059-1 - 2105059-10
Article number: 2105059
CC BY (attribution alone)
open journal
final published version
at the time of publication
public
200
15,1