Dual roles of tropomyosin as an F‐actin stabilizer and a regulator of muscle contraction in Caenorhabditis elegans body wall muscle

Tropomyosin is a well‐characterized regulator of muscle contraction. It also stabilizes actin filaments in a variety of muscle and non‐muscle cells. Although these two functions of tropomyosin could have different impacts on actin cytoskeletal organization, their functional relationship has not been studied in the same experimental system. Here, we investigated how tropomyosin stabilizes actin filaments and how this function is influenced by muscle contraction in Caenorhabditis elegans body wall muscle. We confirmed the antagonistic role of tropomyosin against UNC‐60B, a muscle‐specific ADF/cofilin isoform, in actin filament organization using multiple UNC‐60B mutant alleles. Tropomyosin was also antagonistic to UNC‐78 (AIP1) in vivo and protected actin filaments from disassembly by UNC‐60B and UNC‐78 in vitro, suggesting that tropomyosin protects actin filaments from the ADF/cofilin‐AIP1 actin disassembly system in muscle cells. A mutation in the myosin heavy chain caused greater reduction in contractility than tropomyosin depletion. However, the myosin mutation showed much weaker suppression of the phenotypes of ADF/cofilin or AIP1 mutants than tropomyosin depletion. These results suggest that muscle contraction has only minor influence on the tropomyosin's protective role against ADF/cofilin and AIP1, and that the two functions of tropomyosin in actin stability and muscle contraction are independent of each other. Cell Motil. Cytoskeleton 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.