A physical perspective on cytoplasmic streaming (invited)

Abstract

Organisms show a remarkable range of sizes, yet the dimensions of a single cell rarely exceed $100$ $\mu$m. While the physical and biological origins of this constraint remain poorly understood, exceptions to this rule give valuable insights. A well-known counterexample is the aquatic plant $Chara$, whose cells can exceed $10$ cm in length and $1$ mm in diameter. Two spiraling bands of molecular motors at the cell periphery drive the cellular fluid up and down at speeds up to $100$ $\mu$m/s, motion that has been hypothesized to mitigate the slowness of metabolite transport on these scales and to aid in homeostasis. This is the most organized instance of a broad class of continuous motions known as "cytoplasmic streaming", found in a wide range of eukaryotic organisms - algae, plants, amoebae, nematodes, and flies - often in unusually large cells. In this overview of the physics of this phenomenon, we examine the interplay between streaming, transport and cell size, and discuss the possible role of self-organization phenomena in establishing the observed patterns of streaming.

17 pages, 5 figures. Contribution to a theme issue of Interface Focus on "Bioinspiration of new technologies" and Royal Society meeting. See https://royalsociety.org/events/2015/05/bioinspiration-of-new-technologies/

References in corpus (9)

• Confinement Stabilizes a Bacterial Suspension into a Spiral Vortex
• Fluid Flows Created by Swimming Bacteria Drive Self-Organization in Confined Suspensions
• Spontaneous Circulation of Confined Active Suspensions
• Cytoplasmic Streaming in Plant Cells Emerges Naturally by Microfilament Self-Organization
• Membrane Viscosity Determined from Shear-Driven Flow in Giant Vesicles
• Measurement of Cytoplasmic Streaming in Chara Corallina by Magnetic Resonance Velocimetry
• Shear-Driven Circulation Patterns in Lipid Membrane Vesicles
• Coupling of Active Motion and Advection Shapes Intracellular Cargo Transport
• Cytoplasmic streaming in plant cells: the role of wall slip

Cited by in corpus (21)

• A classical nucleation theory description of active colloid assembly
• First passage time statistics for two-channel diffusion
• Swirling Instability of the Microtubule Cytoskeleton
• Self-organized mechano-chemical dynamics in amoeboid locomotion of Physarum fragments
• Viscoelastic and elastomeric active matter: Linear instability and nonlinear dynamics
• Oscillatory fluid flow drives scaling of contraction wave with system size
• Nonequilibrium Transport Induced by Biological Nanomachines
• Bending Instability of Rod-shaped Bacteria
• Active transport improves the precision of linear long distance molecular signalling
• Dynamic-OCT simulation framework based on mathematical models of intratissue dynamics, image formation, and measurement noise
• Stochastic Fluid Dynamics Simulations of the Velocity Distribution in Protoplasmic Streaming
• Theoretical model of confined thermoviscous flows for artificial cytoplasmic streaming
• Hydrodynamic mechanism for stable spindle positioning in meiosis II oocytes
• Self-generated electrokinetic flows from active-charged boundary patterns
• Spontaneous assembly of condensate networks during the demixing of structured fluids
• Axisymmetric thermoviscous and thermal expansion flows for microfluidics
• Chaos and mixing in self-propelled droplets
• The matter/life nexus in biological cells
• Natural convection in the cytoplasm: Theoretical predictions of buoyancy-driven flows inside a cell
• Cytosolic flow induced symmetry breaking in a conceptual polarity model
• Method of regularised stokeslets: Flow analysis and improvement of convergence