Physical Principles Underlying the Complex Biology of Intracellular Phase Transitions

By Jeong-Mo Choi, Alex S. Holehouse, Rohit V. Pappu. Annual Review of Biophysics, 2020

778 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many biomolecular condensates appear to form via spontaneous or driven processes that have the hallmarks of intracellular phase transitions. This suggests that a common underlying physical framework might govern the formation of functionally and compositionally unrelated biomolecular condensates. Here, we summarize recent work that leverages a stickers-and-spacers framework adapted from the field of associative polymers for understanding how multivalent protein and RNA molecules drive phase transitions that give rise to biomolecular condensates. We provide an overview of the model and its connections to known drivers of biomolecular condensates. We discuss how the valence of stickers impacts the driving forces for condensate formation and elaborate on how stickers can be distinguished from spacers in different contexts. We touch upon the impact of sticker- and spacer-mediated interactions on the rheological properties of condensates and show how the model can be mapped to known drivers of different types of biomolecular condensates.

Subfields: Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0cbe87891f2e8b27ba243318e9ecdadfb5a812d7

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In Molecular Biology

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Physics-driven coarse-grained model for biomolecular phase separation with near-quantitative accuracy (2021, background): “However, in crowded intracellular environments, three-and higher-body energy terms may become important and, accordingly, cooperative interactions can reshape the phase boundaries of LLPS systems 5,51 .”