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. 2020 Jun 4;11:2809. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-16580-3

Fig. 4. Disease-related tau modifications significantly enhance liquid droplet formation.

Fig. 4

a Images of tau-GFP, P301L-GFP, AT8-GFP liquid droplets with a range of protein concentrations (0.5–8 μM) after 2 h incubation under crowding conditions. Scale bar is 40 µm. b Linear regression analysis for estimating the critical droplet concentration (i.e. x-intercept) for each tau construct (graph represents mean ± SD; n = 3 independent experiments). The CDC for P301L-GFP (0.53 μM; r2 = 0.99) and AT8-GFP (0.63 μM; r2 = 0.98) were slightly lower than the CDC of tau-GFP (0.74 μM; r2 = 0.98), but the differences did not reach statistical significance (p = 0.32, one-way ANOVA). c Images of tau-GFP, P301L-GFP and AT8-GFP (all at 2 µM) liquid droplets under crowding conditions after 1 h incubation. Scale bar is 2 μm. d The extent of droplet formation (total area), individual droplet size and droplet fluorescence intensity were significantly higher in P301L-GFP and AT8-GFP droplets compared to tau-GFP droplets (graph represents mean ± SD; n = 3 independent experiments; one-way ANOVA with Holm–Sidak post-hoc test, ****p = 0.0039, ***p = 0.0075, **p = 0.0021, *p = 0.0272, #p = 0.0474). All experiments in LLPS buffer +10% PEG. Source data for b and d provided in the Source Data file.