相关论文: Aging of dynamically stabilized microtubules
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…
The formation, maintenance and reorganization of the cytoskeletal filament network is essential for a number of cellular processes. While the crucial role played by active forces generated by motor proteins has been studied extensively,…
Biological activity gives rise to non-equilibrium fluctuations in the cytoplasm of cells; however, there are few methods to directly measure these fluctuations. Using a reconstituted actin cytoskeleton, we show that the bending dynamics of…
Active filaments, such as microtubules with attached cargo-carrying motor proteins, are important dynamic structures for fluid transport in and around living cells. The mathematical models of active filaments appearing in the literature…
We model the dynamical states of the C-termini of tubulin dimers that comprise neuronal microtubules. We use molecular dynamics and other computational tools to explore the time-dependent behavior of conformational states of a C-terminus 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…
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…
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 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 structural integrity of microtubules is paramount for cellular function. We present a theoretical analysis of their lattice fracture, focusing on the influence of multi-seam structures arising from monomer defects and aiming to provide…
Microtubule dynamic instability allows search and capture of kinetochores during spindle formation, an important process for accurate chromosome segregation during cell division. Recent work has found that microtubule rotational diffusion…
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…
Soft solids with tunable mechanical response are at the core of new material technologies, but a crucial limit for applications is their progressive aging over time, which dramatically affects their functionalities. The generally accepted…
Microtubules are filamentous tubular protein polymers which are essential for a range of cellular behaviour, and are generally straight over micron length scales. However, in some gliding assays, where microtubules move over a carpet of…
Starting from the hypothesis that the tubulin dimer is a conformationally bistable molecule - fluctuating between a curved and a straight configuration at room temperature - we develop a model for polymorphic dynamics of the microtubule…
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 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…
The mitotic spindle lies at the heart of the spatio-temporal control over cellular components during cell division. The spindle consists of microtubules, which are not only crosslinked by motor proteins but also by passive binding proteins.…
In this paper we address some modelling issues related to biological growth. Our treatment is based on a recently-proposed, general formulation for growth within the context of Mixture Theory (Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids,…
Microtubules self-organize to form part of the cellular cytoskeleton. They give cells their shape and play a crucial role in cell division and intracellular transport. Strikingly, microtubules driven by motor proteins reorganize into stable…