Direct visualization of disassembly pathways in active protein filaments

A defining goal of soft matter research is to uncover physical principles of biological organization and recapitulate their structures and functions in synthetic materials. To date, dedicated efforts on understanding self-assembly, the process by which individual components organize themselves into functional structures, has yielded invaluable quantitative theories and experimental protocols across colloidal physics, nanotechnology, and bioengineering. However, biological systems exist in a delicate out-of-equilibrium balance and cannot be described purely by self-assembly.

Equally crucial for their development, growth, and function is disassembly, the process by which structures dissociate into their components. Nevertheless, physical principles of disassembly remain elusive. As a first step toward the development of a physical understanding, we directly examine the disassembly of self-assembled protein filaments. Specifically, we present preliminary results from interferometric scattering microscopy experiments, which allow us to directly visualize disassembly with high spatiotemporal resolution. We anticipate that such measurements will lay the groundwork for a general quantitative theory.