Speaker
Description
In the oocyte of the common fruit fly, large scale cytoplasmic flows appear in the mid-to-late stages of oogenesis. Proteins, synthesized in adjoining nurse cells, and yolk, endocytosed through the cell cortex, are transported and mixed throughout the oocyte, presumably accelerated by the cytoplasmic flows. While a biophysical mechanism has been proposed which explains the onset of cytoplasmic streaming flows [1,2], the flows thereby produced are poor at mixing and typically orient themselves orthogonal to the required transport direction [3]. In this talk, we explore further mechanisms which accelerate cytoplasmic mixing and transport.
[1] David B. Stein, Gabriele De Canio, Eric Lauga, Michael J. Shelley, and Raymond E. Goldstein. Swirling instability of the microtubule cytoskeleton. Physical Review Letters, 126(2):028103, 2021.
[2] Sayantan Dutta, Reza Farhadifar, Wen Lu, Gokberk Kabacaoglu, Robert Blackwell, David B. Stein, Margot Lakonishok, Vladimir I. Gelfand, Stanislav Y. Shvartsman, and Michael J. Shelley. Self-organized intracellular twisters. Nature Physics, 20(4):666-674, 2024.
[3] Olenka Jain, Brato Chakrabarti, Reza Farhadifar, Elizabeth R. Gavis, Michael J. Shelley, and Stanislav Y. Shvartsman. Geometric effects in large scale intracellular flows. PRX Life, 3(2):023007, 2025.
