Date: Monday, October 7, 2002
Time: 3:15-4:15pm
Place: 318 DBRT

Speaker: Ivan V. Maly

From: Department of Cell and Molecular Biology,
The Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University

Title: Self-organization of treadmilling microtubules into a polar array

Abstract
Microtubules are linear protein polymers that direct transport inside biological cells, and so their polar array defines the dynamic spatial organization of the cell. The ability of the microtubules to form the polar array spontaneously is known from experiments and has long been explained as an emergent effect of transport of microtubules themselves along each other. However, the self-organizing microtubules proved immobile in the recent experiments (Vorobjev et al., PNAS 98:10160). To resolve this paradox, we formulate a quantitative model of polymerization-depolymerization dynamics of microtubules that is called treadmilling. Based on this model, we propose that the autonomous ability of microtubules to form a polar array arises from their treadmilling within the space constrained by the cell boundary (Maly Borisy, Trends in Cell Biology, Early Edition).