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Physical Model of Contractile Ring Initiation in Dividing Cells

Chemical Physics, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Roie Shlomovitz, Tel.: 972-934-6031; E-mail: roie{at}wisemail.weizmann.ac.il.

We present a physical mechanism to describe initiation of the contractile ring during cell division. The model couples the membrane curvature with the contractile forces produced by protein clusters attached to the membrane. These protein clusters are mobile on the membrane and possess either an isotropic or an anisotropic spontaneous curvature. Our results show that under these conditions the contraction force gives rise to an instability that corresponds in a closed cellular system to the initiation of the contractile ring. We find a quantization of this process at distinct length-scales, which we compare to available data for different types of eukaryote cells.