Related papers: Polymorphic Dynamics of Microtubules
Microtubules have been in biophysical focus for several decades. Yet the confusing and mutually contradicting results regarding their elasticity and fluctuations have shed some doubts on their present understanding. In this paper we expose…
Microtubules are stiff filamentary proteins that constitute an important component of the cytoskeleton of cells. These are known to exhibit a dynamic instability. A steadily growing microtubule can suddenly start depolymerizing very…
Microtubule dynamic instability arises from the hydrolysis of GTP bound to the beta-monomer of the tubulin dimer. The conformational change induced by hydrolysis is unknown, but microtubules disassemble into protofilaments of GDP-bound…
Thermal shape fluctuations of grafted microtubules were studied using high resolution particle tracking of attached fluorescent beads. First mode relaxation times were extracted from the mean square displacement in the transverse…
The fate of every eukaryotic cell subtly relies on the exceptional mechanical properties of microtubules. Despite significant efforts, understanding their unusual mechanics remains elusive. One persistent, unresolved mystery is the…
We investigate the mechanical origin of polymorphic structures in two-dimensional tubulin assemblies, of which microtubules are the best known example. These structures feature twisted ribbons, flat tubulin sheets, macrotubules, and hoops,…
Microtubules are a major component of the cytoskeleton distinguished by highly dynamic behavior both in vitro and in vivo. We propose a general mathematical model that accounts for the growth, catastrophe, rescue and nucleation processes in…
If the dynamic instability of microtubules follows a gamma distribution then one can associate to it a Cantor set
Here we study a driven lattice gas model for microtubule depolymerizing molecular motors, where traffic jams of motors induce stochastic switching between microtubule growth and shrinkage. We term this phenomenon \enquote{traffic dynamic…
We study avenues to shape multistability and shape-morphing in flexible crystalline membranes of cylindrical topology, enabled by glide mobility of dislocations. Using computational modeling, we obtain states of mechanical equilibrium…
Microtubules (MTs) represent basic components of a cytoskeleton. The present work studies nonlinear dynamics of MTs assuming tangential oscillations of the dimers. We introduce a two component model and show that the dynamics of MTs can be…
Dynamic instability of microtubules is considered using frameworks of non-linear thermodynamics and non-equilibrium reaction-diffusion systems. Stochastic assembly/disassembly phases in the polymerization dynamics of microtubules are…
The microtubule is a cylindrical biological polymer that plays key roles in cellular structure, transport, and signalling. In this work, based on studies of electronic properties of polyacetelene and mechanical properties of microtubules…
Tubular lattices are ubiquitous in nature and technology. Microtubules and nanotubes of all kinds act as important pillars of biological cells and the man-made nano-world. We show that when prestress is introduced in such structures,…
We investigate an analytically tractable toy model for thermally induced polymorphic dynamics of cooperatively rearranging biofilaments - like microtubules. The proposed 4 -block model, which can be seen as a coarse-grained approximation of…
In the present paper we describe a model of nonlinear dynamics of microtubules (MT) assuming a single longitudinal degree of freedom per tubulin dimer. This is a longitudinal displacement of a dimer at a certain position with respect to the…
A novel theoretical model of dynamic instability of a system of linear (1D) microtubules (MTs) in a bounded domain is introduced for studying the role of a cell edge in vivo and analyzing the effect of competition for a limited amount of…
We study the dynamics and phase behaviour of a dry suspension of microtubules and molecular motors. We obtain a set of continuum equations by rigorously coarse graining a microscopic model where motor-induced interactions lead to parallel…
We present a general theory for the equilibrium structure of cylindrical tubules and helical ribbons of chiral lipid membranes. This theory is based on a continuum elastic free energy that permits variations in the direction of molecular…
We propose a stochastic model that accounts for the growth, catastrophe and rescue processes of steady state microtubules assembled from MAP-free tubulin. Both experimentally and theoretically we study the perturbation of microtubule…