ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2006
Thermal fluctuations of grafted microtubules provide evidence of a length-dependent persistence length.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 115 papers.
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115 citing papers in PubMed.
- Structure and dynamics of a four-protofilament microtubule from Heimdallarchaeales α/β-tubulin.Science advances · 2026Article
- Spatial confinement shapes organelle architecture and remodeling in axons.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Microtubule stiffening by the doublecortin-domain protein ZYG-8 contributes to mitotic spindle orientation during zygote division in Caenorhabditis elegans.PLoS genetics · 2026Article
- Scale-dependent universality class crossover in magnetic skyrmion polymers.Npj spintronics · 2026Article
- Form and function in biological filaments: a physicist's review.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2025Review
- Does GLUT4 Queue? A Mechanistic Mathematical Model for Insulin Response in Adipocytes.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- Polymeric and Polymer-Functionalized Drug Delivery Vectors: From Molecular Architecture and Elasticity to Cellular Uptake.Polymers · 2025Review
- Protein design of two-component tubular assemblies similar to cytoskeletons.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Cellular mechanisms of traumatic brain injury.npj biological physics and mechanics · 2025Review
- Mechanical fatigue in microtubules.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Mechanical coupling coordinates microtubule growth.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Approximate simulation of cortical microtubule models using dynamical graph grammars.Physical biology · 2023Article
- Article
- The rate of microtubule breaking increases exponentially with curvature.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Strain stiffening of Ndc80 complexes attached to microtubule plus ends.Biophysical journal · 2022Article
- Actomyosin contractility and buckling of microtubules in nucleation, growth and disassembling of focal adhesions.Biomechanics and modeling in mechanobiology · 2022Article
- Article
- Measurement of the persistence length of cytoskeletal filaments using curvature distributions.Biophysical journal · 2022Article
- Linking path and filament persistence lengths of microtubules gliding over kinesin.Scientific reports · 2022Article
55 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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6 authors.
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Abstract
Microtubules are hollow cylindrical structures that constitute one of the three major classes of cytoskeletal filaments. On the mesoscopic length scale of a cell, their material properties are characterized by a single stiffness parameter, the persistence length l(p). Its value, in general, depends on the microscopic interactions between the constituent tubulin dimers and the architecture of the microtubule. Here, we use single-particle tracking methods combined with a fluctuation analysis to systematically study the dependence of l(p) on the total filament length L. Microtubules are grafted to a substrate with one end free to fluctuate in three dimensions. A fluorescent bead is attached proximally to the free tip and is used to record the thermal fluctuations of the microtubule's end. The position distribution functions obtained with this assay allow the precise measurement of l(p) for microtubules of different contour length L. Upon varying L between 2.6 and 47.5 mum, we find a systematic increase of l(p) from 110 to 5,035 mum. At the same time we verify that, for a given filament length, the persistence length is constant over the filament within the experimental accuracy. We interpret this length dependence as a consequence of a nonnegligible shear deflection determined by subnanometer relative displacement of adjacent protofilaments. Our results may shine new light on the function of microtubules as sophisticated nanometer-sized molecular machines and give a unified explanation of seemingly uncorrelated spreading of microtubules' stiffness previously reported in literature.
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