Figure 3. Synthetic crosslinkers nonmonotonically influence the elasticity of actin networks.

a) Elastic moduli of actin networks were investigated for different concentrations of wLX (red) and sPX (green) crosslinkers. Both initially stiffened the networks with increasing concentration before reaching a peak, which was followed by a decrease of G′ to a minimum with a subsequent monotonic increase (power-law fits (black line) and exponents are shown next to the corresponding G′ increase). This nonmonotonic behavior can be attributed to different structural morphologies, which were captured by b) light scattering (blue; error bars indicate standard deviations of the mean values) and c) fluorescence microscopy.