Light-induced ATP driven self-assembly of actin and heavy-meromyosin in proteo-tubularsomes as a step toward artificial cells

Abstract

In this work, we studied the light induced self-assembly of F-actin and heavy meromyosin (HMM) in tubular vesicles or “tubularsomes” during initiation by ATP. To mimic nature, light-induced ATP synthesis was used for the F-actin/HMM self-assembly inside these vesicles created from a triblock copolymer reconstituted with the membrane protein bacteriorhodopsin (bR) and F₁F₀-ATPase along with F-actin and HMM in the core.