Arrested in Glass: Actin within Sophisticated Architectures of Biosilica in Sponges
Related Research units
Abstract
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 ptterned.
Bibliographical data
Original language | English |
---|---|
ISSN | 2198-3844 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 04.2022 |
Comment Deanary
© 2022 The Authors. Advanced Science published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.
PubMed | 35156333 |
---|