Mechanobiology of Protein Droplets: Force Arises from Disorder.

Welsh, Timothy J; Shen, Yi; Levin, Aviad; Knowles, Tuomas P J · Cell · 2018

editorial · Level V

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Abstract

The use of optogenetic approaches has revealed new roles for intracellular protein condensates described in two papers in this issue of Cell (Bracha et. al., 2018; Shin et al., 2018). These results show that growing condensates are able to exert mechanical forces resulting in chromatin rearrangement, establishing a new role for liquid-liquid phase separation in the mechanobiology of the cell.

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