Large self-assembled clathrin lattices spontaneously disassemble without sufficient adaptor proteins.

Clathrin-coated structures must assemble on cell membranes to internalize receptors, with the clathrin protein only linked to the membrane via adaptor proteins. These structures can grow surprisingly large, containing over 20 clathrin, yet they often fail to form productive vesicles, instead aborting and disassembling. We show that clathrin structures of this size can both form and disassemble spontaneously when adaptor protein availability is low, despite high abundance of clathrin. Here, we combine recent in vitro kinetic measurements with microscopic reaction-diffusion simulations and theory to differentiate mechanisms of stable vs unstable clathrin assembly on membranes. While in vitro conditions drive assembly of robust, stable lattices, we show that concentrations, geometry, and dimensional reduction in physiologic-like conditions do not support nucleation if only the key adaptor AP-2 is included, due to its insufficient abundance. Nucleation requires a stoichiometry of adaptor to clathrin that exceeds 1:1, meaning additional adaptor types are necessary to form lattices successfully and efficiently. We show that the critical nucleus contains ~25 clathrin, remarkably similar to sizes of the transient and abortive structures observed in vivo. Lastly, we quantify the cost of bending the membrane under our curved clathrin lattices using a continuum membrane model. We find that the cost of bending the membrane could be largely offset by the energetic benefit of forming curved rather than flat structures, with numbers comparable to experiments. Our model predicts how adaptor density can tune clathrin-coated structures from the transient to the stable, showing that active energy consumption is therefore not required for lattice disassembly or remodeling during growth, which is a critical advance towards predicting productive vesicle formation. Author summary: Stochastic self-assembly of clathrin-coated structures on the plasma membrane is essential for transport into cells. We show here that even with abundant clathrin available, robust nucleation and growth into stable structures on membranes is not possible without sufficient adaptor proteins. Our results thus provide quantitative justification for why structures observed to form in vivo can still spontaneously disassemble over many seconds. Although clathrin disassembly after productive vesicle formation requires the work of ATPases, our study shows that active energy input is not necessary to control remodeling during growth. With parameterization against in vitro kinetics of assembly on membranes, our reaction-diffusion model provides a powerful and extensible tool for establishing determinants of productive assembly in cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]