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Contractility in animal cells is often generated by molecular motors such asmyosin, which require polar substrates for their function. Motivated by recentexperimental evidence of motor-independent contractility, we propose a robustmotor-free mechanism that can generate contraction in biopolymer networkswithout the need for substrate polarity. We show that contractility is anatural consequence of active binding/unbinding of crosslinkers that breaks thePrinciple of Detailed Balance, together with the asymmetric force-extensionresponse of semiflexible biopolymers. We calculate the resulting contractilevelocity using both a simple coarse-grained model and a more detailedmicroscopic model for a viscoelastic biopolymer network. Our model may providean explanation of recent reports of motor-independent contractility in cells.Our results also suggest a mechanism for generating contractile forces insynthetic active materials.

Motor-free contractility of active biopolymer networks