@article{789786e7edb34baa86279a9917855acb,
title = "Intracellular production of hydrogels and synthetic RNA granules by multivalent molecular interactions",
abstract = "Some protein components of intracellular non-membrane-bound entities, such as RNA granules, are known to form hydrogels in vitro. The physico-chemical properties and functional role of these intracellular hydrogels are difficult to study, primarily due to technical challenges in probing these materials in situ. Here, we present iPOLYMER, a strategy for a rapid induction of protein-based hydrogels inside living cells that explores the chemically inducible dimerization paradigm. Biochemical and biophysical characterizations aided by computational modelling show that the polymer network formed in the cytosol resembles a physiological hydrogel-like entity that acts as a size-dependent molecular sieve. We functionalize these polymers with RNA-binding motifs that sequester polyadenine-containing nucleotides to synthetically mimic RNA granules. These results show that iPOLYMER can be used to synthetically reconstitute the nucleation of biologically functional entities, including RNA granules in intact cells.",
author = "Hideki Nakamura and Lee, {Albert A.} and Afshar, {Ali Sobhi} and Shigeki Watanabe and Elmer Rho and Shiva Razavi and Allister Suarez and Lin, {Yu Chun} and Makoto Tanigawa and Brian Huang and Robert DeRose and Diana Bobb and William Hong and Gabelli, {Sandra B.} and John Goutsias and Takanari Inoue",
note = "Funding Information: We are grateful to N. Kedersha and P. Anderson who provided helpful discussions and reagents related to stress granules, to J. L. Pfaltz who collaborated with A.S.A. to develop a modified CCC code for identifying chordless cycles in graphs, and to R. Reed, A. Ewald, H. Sesaki, M. Iijima and S. Regot for sharing their resources for our experiments.We also extend our appreciation to J. P. Gong, I. Hamachi, R. Yoshida for valuable comments on our work. This work was mainly supported by the Johns Hopkins University Catalyst Fund to T.I., and in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (GM092930, DK102910, CA103175 and DK089502 to T.I., and T32GM007445 to A.S.), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) (CCF-1217213 to J.G.). Funding Information: We are grateful to N. Kedersha and P. Anderson who provided helpful discussions and reagents related to stress granules, to J. L. Pfaltz who collaborated with A.S.A. to develop a modified C++ code for identifying chordless cycles in graphs, and to R. Reed, A. Ewald, H. Sesaki, M. Iijima and S. Regot for sharing their resources for our experiments. We also extend our appreciation to J. P. Gong, I. Hamachi, R. Yoshida for valuable comments on our work. This work was mainly supported by the Johns Hopkins University Catalyst Fund to T.I., and in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (GM092930, DK102910, CA103175 and DK089502 to T.I., and T32GM007445 to A.S.), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) (CCF-1217213 to J.G.). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved. Copyright: Copyright 2017 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.",
year = "2018",
month = jan,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1038/NMAT5006",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "17",
pages = "79--88",
journal = "Nature Materials",
issn = "1476-1122",
publisher = "Nature Publishing Group",
number = "1",
}