{"doi":"10.1101/2023.10.26.561921","title":"Turn-On Protein Switches for Controlling Actin Binding in Cells","abstract":"Within a shared cytoplasm, filamentous actin (F-actin) plays numerous and critical roles across the cell body. Cells rely on actin-binding proteins (ABPs) to organize F-actin and to integrate its polymeric characteristics into diverse cellular processes. Yet, the multitude of ABPs that engage with and shape F-actin make studying a single ABP's influence on cellular activities a significant challenge. Moreover, without a means of manipulating actin-binding subcellularly, harnessing the F-actin cytoskeleton for synthetic biology purposes remains elusive. Here, we describe a suite of designed proteins, Controllable Actin-binding Switch Tools (CASTs), whose actin-binding behavior can be controlled with external stimuli. CASTs were developed that respond to different external inputs, providing options for turn-on kinetics and enabling orthogonality. Being genetically encoded, we show that CASTs can be inserted into native protein sequences to control F-actin association locally and engineered into new structures to control cell and tissue shape and behavior.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2023,"id":397579,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9585,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1173817,"name":"Hannah Khairandish","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1036028,"name":"Isabela Ramirez-Velez","orcid":"0000-0002-5531-1573","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":931942,"name":"Yanran Wang","orcid":"0000-0002-9523-8294","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":280923,"name":"Brian Belardi","orcid":"0000-0003-3608-0164","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1173419,"name":"Unyime M. Effiong","orcid":"0009-0007-7637-4147","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":82,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:19:39.497368Z","pmid":"37961502","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}