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The mechanical properties of the cell depend crucially on the tension of itscytoskeleton, a biopolymer network that is put under stress by active motorproteins. While the fibrous nature of the network is known to strongly affectthe transmission of these forces to the cellular scale, our understanding ofthis process remains incomplete. Here we investigate the transmission of forcesthrough the network at the individual filament level, and show that activeforces can be geometrically amplified as a transverse motor-generated forceforce "plucks" the fiber and induces a nonlinear tension. In stiff and denselyconnnected networks, this tension results in large network-wide tensilestresses that far exceed the expectation drawn from a linear elastic theory.This amplification mechanism competes with a recently characterizednetwork-level amplification due to fiber buckling, suggesting that that fibernetworks provide several distinct pathways for living systems to amplify theirmolecular forces.

Fiber plucking by molecular motors yields large emergent contractility in stiff biopolymer networks