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Cell-membrane mechanics

Vesicles in and tubes out

Nature Materials volume 10, pages 561–562 (2011)Cite this article

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Living cells regulate their area through active mechanisms, which often lead to the fusion and fission of lipid vesicles. It is now found that bilayers adhered to elastic substrates can also adjust their area passively, in response to applied lateral strains.

Naked lipid bilayers are virtually incompressible. On stretching, they only expand by a few per cent before they tear apart1. This is in apparent contradiction to what is observed in living cells of all sorts — animal, plant and bacterial — which constantly change the surface area of their plasma membrane in response to physiological and mechanical events. However, pieces of membrane can be excised or incorporated. Indeed, the primary mechanisms of membrane-area regulation in living cells are endo- and exocytosis — actively controlled intake and secretion, respectively, of vesicle-enclosed components — which are essential processes, for example, during growth, when cells have to increase their overall surface area. Reporting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Howard Stone and co-workers propose that lipid bilayers can also control their surface area passively when attached to (or confined to) elastic substrates2. They show that stretching of bilayer-adhered polymeric substrates leads to the spontaneous uptake of vesicles, whereas compression causes reversible expulsion of membrane tubes.

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Figure 1: Passive membrane-area regulation in response to lateral strain.
Figure 2: The process of blebbing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marileen Dogterom and Gijsje Koenderink are at the FOM Institute AMOLF, Science Park 104, 1098 XG Amsterdam, The Netherlands,

    Marileen Dogterom & Gijsje Koenderink

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  1. Marileen Dogterom
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  2. Gijsje Koenderink
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Correspondence to Marileen Dogterom.

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Dogterom, M., Koenderink, G. Vesicles in and tubes out. Nature Mater 10, 561–562 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3081

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