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  • Title: Annealing accounts for the length of actin filaments formed by spontaneous polymerization.
    Author: Sept D, Xu J, Pollard TD, McCammon JA.
    Journal: Biophys J; 1999 Dec; 77(6):2911-9. PubMed ID: 10585915.
    Abstract:
    We measured the lengths of actin filaments formed by spontaneous polymerization of highly purified actin monomers by fluorescence microscopy after labeling with rhodamine-phalloidin. The length distributions are exponential with a mean of approximately 7 microm (2600 subunits). This length is independent of the initial concentration of actin monomer, an observation inconsistent with a simple nucleation-elongation mechanism. However, with the addition of physically reasonable rates of filament annealing and fragmenting, a nucleation-elongation mechanism can reproduce the observed average length of filaments in two types of experiments: 1) filaments formed from a wide range of highly purified actin monomer concentrations, and 2) filaments formed from 24 microM actin over a range of CapZ concentrations.
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