Collision induced spatial organization of microtubules

Abstract

The dynamic behavior of microtubules in solution can be strongly modified by interactions with walls or other structures. We examine here a microtubule growth model where the increase in size of the plus-end is perturbed by collisions with other microtubules. We show that such a simple mechanism of constrained growth can induce ordered structures and patterns from an initially isotropic and homogeneous suspension. First, microtubules self-organize locally in randomly oriented domains that grow and compete with each other. By imposing even a weak orientation bias, external forces like gravity or cellular boundaries may bias the domain distribution eventually leading to a macroscopic sample orientation.

Submitted to Biophysical Journal

References in corpus (2)

• Nematic Ordering of Rigid Rods in a Gravitational Field
• Self-assembled aggregates in the gravitational field: growth and nematic order

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Possible mechanisms for initiating macroscopic left-right asymmetry in developing organisms
• Collective dynamics of active filament complexes
• A mean-field theory approach to 3D nematic phase transitions in microtubules