ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2009
A theory of microtubule catastrophes and their regulation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
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36 citing papers in PubMed, 93 citations in OpenAlex.
- Many will enter, few will win: Cost and sensitivity of exploratory dynamics.Biophysical journal · 2026Article
- Hydrolysis-dependent severing tunes internal monomeric heterogeneity to shape actin length distributions.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Physical effects of crowdant size and concentration on collective microtubule polymerization.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- EB3-informed dynamics of the microtubule stabilizing cap during stalled growth.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- Interface-acting nucleotide controls polymerization dynamics at microtubule plus- and minus-ends.eLife · 2024Article
- Effects of random hydrolysis on biofilament length distributions in a shared subunit pool.Biophysical journal · 2022Article
- Effects of length-dependent positive feedback on length distributions of microtubules undergoing hydrolysis.Journal of biosciences · 2022Article
- Atomistic molecular dynamics simulations of tubulin heterodimers explain the motion of a microtubule.European biophysics journal : EBJ · 2021Article
- Dynamic Instability from Non-equilibrium Structural Transitions on the Energy Landscape of Microtubule.Cell systems · 2020Article
- Mechanics and kinetics of dynamic instability.eLife · 2020Article
- Spatio-temporal correlations between catastrophe events in a microtubule bundle: a computational study.European biophysics journal : EBJ · 2020Article
- Review
- Long-range, through-lattice coupling improves predictions of microtubule catastrophe.Molecular biology of the cell · 2019Article
- Effects of spatial dimensionality and steric interactions on microtubule-motor self-organization.Physical biology · 2019Article
- Article
- Signatures of a macroscopic switching transition for a dynamic microtubule.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- GDP-to-GTP exchange on the microtubule end can contribute to the frequency of catastrophe.Molecular biology of the cell · 2016Article
- Microtubule aging probed by microfluidics-assisted tubulin washout.Molecular biology of the cell · 2016Article
- Article
- Molecular and Mechanical Causes of Microtubule Catastrophe and Aging.Biophysical journal · 2015Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Dynamic instability, in which abrupt transitions occur between growing and shrinking states, is an intrinsic property of microtubules that is regulated by both mechanics and specialized proteins. We discuss a model of dynamic instability based on the popular idea that growth is maintained by a cap at the tip of the fiber. The loss of this cap is thought to trigger the transition from growth to shrinkage, called a catastrophe. The model includes longitudinal interactions between the terminal tubulins of each protofilament and "gating rescues" between neighboring protofilaments. These interactions allow individual protofilaments to transiently shorten during a phase of overall microtubule growth. The model reproduces the reported dependency of the catastrophe rate on tubulin concentration, the time between tubulin dilution and catastrophe, and the induction of microtubule catastrophes by walking depolymerases. The model also reproduces the comet tail distribution that is characteristic of proteins that bind to the tips of growing microtubules.
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