Related papers: Dynamics of Microtubule Growth and Catastrophe
We investigate the dynamics of an idealized model of microtubule growth that evolves by: (i) attachment of guanosine triphosphate (GTP) at rate lambda, (ii) conversion of GTP to guanosine diphosphate (GDP) at rate 1, and (iii) detachment of…
The disappearance of the guanosine triphosphate (GTP)-tubulin cap is widely believed to be the forerunner event for the growth-shrinkage transition (`catastrophe') in microtubule filaments in eukaryotic cells. We study a discrete version of…
In this study, a two-state mechanochemical model is presented to describe the dynamic instability of microtubules (MTs) in cells. The MTs switches between two states, assembly state and disassembly state. In assembly state, the growth of…
Microtubule dynamics is largely influenced by nucleotide hydrolysis and the resultant tubulin configuration changes. The GTP cap model has been proposed to interpret the stabilizing mechanism of microtubule growth from the view of…
We investigate the microtubule polymerization dynamics with catastrophe and rescue events for three different confinement scenarios, which mimic typical cellular environments: (i) The microtubule is confined by rigid and fixed walls, (ii)…
We study a one-dimensional model of microtubule assembly/disassembly in which GTP bound to tubulins within the microtubule undergoes stochastic hydrolysis. In contrast to models that only consider a cap of GTP-bound tubulin, stochastic…
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…
We study the steady state of an assembly of microtubules in a confined volume, analogous to the situation inside a cell where the cell boundary forms a natural barrier to growth. We show that the dynamical equations for growing and…
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…
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…
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…
Microtubules capture chromosomes during mitosis by stochastically switching between growth and shrinkage at catastrophe events. They display strikingly rich biochemistry and dynamics, regulated by a stabilizing cap with distinct…
A simple stochastic model which describes microtubule dynamics and explicitly takes into account the relevant biochemical processes is presented. The model incorporates binding and unbinding of monomers and random phosphate release inside…
Certain regulatory proteins influence the polymerization dynamics of microtubules by inducing catastrophe with a rate that depends on the microtubule length. Using a discrete formulation, here we show that, for a catastrophe rate…
We investigate the cooperative dynamics of an ensemble of N microtubules growing against an elastic barrier. Microtubules undergo so-called catastrophes, which are abrupt stochastic transitions from a growing to a shrinking state, and…
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…
Polymerization of microtubules is ubiquitous in biological cells and under certain conditions it becomes oscillatory in time. Here simple reaction models are analyzed that capture such oscillations as well as the length distribution of…
Several independent observations have suggested that catastrophe transition in microtubules is not a first-order process, as is usually assumed. Recent {\it in vitro} observations by Gardner et al.[ M. K. Gardner et al., Cell {\bf147}, 1092…
Microtubules (MTs) are cytoplasmic protein polymers that are essential for fundamental cellular processes including the maintenance of cell shape, organelle transport and formation of the mitotic spindle. Microtubule dynamic instability is…
This paper provides the phase transition analysis of a reaction diffusion equations system modeling dynamic instability of microtubules. For this purpose we have generalized the macroscopic model studied by Mour\~ao et all [MSS]. This model…