Deep Origin Co-founder and CSO Garegin Papoian's lab at UMD College Park  —   alongside Professor Michael Murrell’s lab at Yale University  —  show in a recent Nature publication that the cell’s internal scaffolding — the actin cytoskeleton — can behave like earthquakes, storing mechanical stress until it suddenly releases in “cytoquakes.”

It turns out that orderly filament arrangements disperse stress gently, while highly branched, tangled networks trap forces locally and trigger abrupt, power-law–distributed energy bursts. Complementing the experiments, computer simulations mapped how altering filament connectivity and motor-filament size steers the network toward or away from critical, avalanche-like behavior.

These findings mirror how waves get stuck in disordered materials and suggest that by adjusting filament architecture and motor activity, cells control movement, shape changes, and mechanical responses.

Why is this a big deal for drug-discovery scientists?

• Cytoquakes are an emergent property of disordered, motor-driven biopolymer networks—the same physics that limits small-molecule access in crowded cytoplasm.
• The work offers a quantitative knob (network topology) that we can now dial in silico when forecasting compound penetration, target engagement, and resistance pathways.

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