Fluids as transducers of gravity in biological systems

Abstract

A qualitative model is presented, suggesting gravitational information is transduced into biological systems primarily by its effect on spatially organised membrane and cytoplasmic flows. Continuous low affinity interactions between membrane bound cytoskeletal proteins and phospholipid flows that are undergoing forced convective and shear driven flows are shown to convert this information into spatial protein patterns, and hence cell shape. As applied here to plant cells, the feedback mechanism is shown capable not only of establishing the strict nanometer scale parallelism that exists between proteins running on the inside and outside of the cell membrane, but also to predict its maintainance and the angle of fibre realignment observed during tropic responses.