A Simple Experimental Model to Investigate Force Range for Membrane Nanotube Formation

The presence of membrane tubules in living cells is essential to many biological processes. In cells, one mechanism to form nano-sized lipid tubules is via molecular motor induced bilayer extraction. In this paper, we describe a simple experimental model to investigate the forces required for lipid tube formation using kinesin motors anchored to 1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DOPC) vesicles. Previous related studies have used molecular motors actively pulling on the membrane to extract a nanotube. Here we invert the system geometry; molecular motors are used as static anchors linking DOPC vesicles to a two-dimensional microtubule network, and an external flow is introduced to generate nanotubes facilitated by the drag force. We find that a drag force of approximately ≈7 pN is sufficient for tubule extraction for vesicles ranging from 1-2 um in radius. By our method, we find that the force generated by a single molecular motor is sufficient for membrane tubule extraction from a spherical lipid vesicle.