Impact of Carbon Nanomaterials on Actin Polymerization

Many nanomaterials have entered people's daily lives and impact the normal process of biological entities consequently. As one kind of the important nanomaterials, carbon based nanomaterials have invoked a lot of concerns from scientific researches because of their unique physicochemical properties. In eukaryotes, actin is the most abundantly distributed protein in both cytoplasm and cell nucleus, and closely controls the cell proliferation and mobility. Recently, many investigations have found some carbon based nanomaterials can affect actin cytoskeleton remarkably, including fullerenes derivatives, carbon nanotubes, graphene and its derivatives. However, these interaction processes are complicated and the underlying mechanism is far from being understood clearly. In this review, we discussed the different mechanisms of carbon nanomaterials impact on actin polymerization into three pathways, as triggering the signaling pathways from carbon nanomaterials outside of cells, increasing the production of reactive oxygen species from carbon nanomaterials inside of cells and direct interaction from carbon nanomaterials inside of cells. As a result, the dimension and size of carbon nanomaterials play a key role in regulation of actin cytoskeleton. Furthermore, we forecasted the possible investigation strategy for meeting the challenges of the future study on this topic. We hope the findings are helpful in understanding the molecular mechanism in carbon nanomaterials regulating actin polymerization, and provide new insight in novel nanomedicine development for inhibition tumor cell migration.