Swirling Instability of the Microtubule Cytoskeleton

Abstract

In the cellular phenomena of cytoplasmic streaming, molecular motors carrying cargo along a network of microtubules entrain the surrounding fluid. The piconewton forces produced by individual motors are sufficient to deform long microtubules, as are the collective fluid flows generated by many moving motors. Studies of streaming during oocyte development in the fruit fly $D.melanogaster$ have shown a transition from a spatially-disordered cytoskeleton, supporting flows with only short-ranged correlations, to an ordered state with a cell-spanning vortical flow. To test the hypothesis that this transition is driven by fluid-structure interactions we study a discrete-filament model and a coarse-grained continuum theory for motors moving on a deformable cytoskeleton, both of which are shown to exhibit a $swirlinginstability$ to spontaneous large-scale rotational motion, as observed.

arXiv comment6 pages, 5 figures and Supplementay Material (5 pages, 5 figures); SM video at website of REG

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• Stability of sedimenting flexible loops
• Well-posedness and applications of classical elastohydrodynamics for a swimming filament
• Efficient Convergent Boundary Integral Methods for Slender Bodies
• Onset of spontaneous beating and whirling in the follower force model of an active filament
• Hydrodynamic theory of flocking at a solid-liquid interface: long range order and giant number fluctuations
• Braided mixing in confined chiral active matter
• Instability and self-propulsion of flexible autophoretic filaments