New preprint: a mechanism for the slow axonal transport of actin

Another work in our fruitful collaboration with Subhojit Roy and his lab (now at UW Madison). In 2015 we could visualize new axonal actin structures by STORM (see our cover): stable clusters every 3-4 µm we called “hotspots” from which “trails” would rapidly assemble and disassemble along the axon. In this new preprint, trails were shown to have a slight anterograde bias (55%) and to polymerize from the surface of the hotspots, pushing the trails away. This suggested that biased dynamic trails assembly could underlie the slow anterograde transport of actin, whose mechanism is still unknown. Modelling done by Nilaj Chakrabarty and Peter Jung (Ohio University) indeed showed that the observed biased assembly and disassembly of trails would lead to a ~0.5 mm/day transport of actin, in line with earlier measurements.