Editorial: The wetware credentials of intermediate filaments involves coordinating, organising and networking in cells and tissues

Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, vol. 11, pp. 1146618

Abstract

Editorial on the Research Topic 3D architecture of intermediate filaments in tissue mechanics and functionIn this special issue there is a collection of articles that highlight the mechano-biological signalling of and the integration of intermediate filaments within the cytoskeletal machinery.The individual and collective contribution of the individual cytoskeletal elements have been well documented (Ge et al., 2020;Serres et al., 2020;Lois-Bermejo et al., 2022;Nunes Vicente et al., 2022;Ridge et al., 2022;Sivagurunathan et al., 2022;Wu et al., 2022).Indeed the importance of the cytoskeleton as an integrated unit is accepted fully in the literature (Pegoraro et al., 2017;Hohmann and Dehghani, 2019).Intermediate filaments interconnect all subcellular compartments and they are the one cytoskeletal element where cross-β-interactions form intracellular hydrogels (Kato and McKnight, 2018) by virtue of their N-and C-terminal intrinsically disordered domains ((IDDs) (Kornreich et al., 2015))-or plainly put-assist their assembly and their associated phase separation events e.g., (Li et al., 2020).It is no coincidence that previously noted "zones of exclusion" observed by conventional transmission electron microscopy (Blose and Chacko, 1976;Borenfreund et al., 1980) should now be interpreted as evidence of their hydrogel potential e.g., nuclear pores ( Fiserova et al., 2014)and cytoplasmic intermediate filament networks (Kornreich et al., 2015).The importance of these IDDs to cell behaviour and to their emergent properties (Ridge et al., 2022) is a hot Research Topic in current debate.This has given rise to exciting hypotheses to explain complex cell behaviours such as motility (see the contributions by Infante and Etienne-Manneville; Kim et al., in this research topic issue) cell polarisation (ibid Despin-Guitard et al.,) epithelial-mesenchymal transitions and inflammatory responses (Ridge et al., 2022).One such hypothesis is the "wetware" concept (Bray, 2009) as a way to conceptualise cellular and tissue decision-making at the level of individual components and processes (Kulkarni et al., 2022).Cell Biology compartmentalises systems and structures, but each function within the context of the cell and the tissue require integration and localised responses of metabolic, structural and cellular pathways.The cytoskeleton collectively provides the architecture (Figure 1) that is needed to sense, communicate and respond to the legion of stimuli received at any one time by each individual cell.It, and its associated biomolecules, can deliver the processing logic for the cell because it provides the required connections (Bray, 2009).In this respect, the intermediate filament cytoskeleton is part and

Authors 2

1. Rudolf E. Leube corresponding Aachen Institute of Molecular and Cellular Anatomy (MOCA)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Molecular and Cellular Anatomy, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

2. Roy A. Quinlan corresponding

   Durham University · University of Washington

   Affiliation as printed

   Biophysical Sciences Institute, University of Durham, Durham, United Kingdom

   Department of Biological Structure, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States

   Department of Biosciences, University of Durham, Upper Mountjoy Science Site, Durham, United Kingdom