Membrane-mediated interactions and the dynamics of dynamin oligomers on membrane tubes

Dynamin is a protein that plays a key role in the transport and recycling of membrane tubes and vesicles within a living cell. This protein adsorbs from solution to PIP₂-containing membranes, and on these tubes it forms curved oligomers that condense into tight helical domains of uniform radius. The dynamics of this process is treated here in terms of the linear stability of a continuum model, whereby membrane-mediated interactions are shown to drive the spontaneous nucleation of condensed dynamin domains. We furthermore show that the deformation of the membrane outside the dynamin domains induces an energy barrier that can hinder the full coalescence of neighboring growing domains. We compare these calculations to experimental observations on dynamin dynamics in vitro.