ArticlePhysical biology2013
Biophysics of filament length regulation by molecular motors.
Article in Physical biology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 31 citations in OpenAlex.
- Both sides now: modeling motor regulation of microtubule length at both ends.Physical biology · 2026Article
- Emergent microtubule properties in a model of filament turnover and nucleation.Journal of theoretical biology · 2026Article
- The flagellar length control system: exploring the physical biology of organelle size.Physical biology · 2023Review
- The effect of motor-induced shaft dynamics on microtubule stability and length.Biophysical journal · 2023Article
- Motor guidance by long-range communication on the microtubule highway.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Modeling spatiotemporally varying protein-protein interactions in CyLaKS, the Cytoskeleton Lattice-based Kinetic Simulator.The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2021Article
- Control of filament length by a depolymerizing gradient.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Theory of Cytoskeletal Reorganization during Cross-Linker-Mediated Mitotic Spindle Assembly.Biophysical journal · 2019Article
- Opposing kinesin complexes queue at plus tips to ensure microtubule catastrophe at cell ends.EMBO reports · 2018Article
- Physical Limits on the Precision of Mitotic Spindle Positioning by Microtubule Pushing forces: Mechanics of mitotic spindle positioning.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2017Review
- Kinesin-8 effects on mitotic microtubule dynamics contribute to spindle function in fission yeast.Molecular biology of the cell · 2016Article
- Phase-plane analysis of the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process with binding kinetics and switching between antiparallel lanes.Physical review. E · 2016Article
- Design Principles of Length Control of Cytoskeletal Structures.Annual review of biophysics · 2016Review
- Motor Protein Accumulation on Antiparallel Microtubule Overlaps.Biophysical journal · 2016Article
- Antenna Mechanism of Length Control of Actin Cables.PLoS computational biology · 2015Article
- Delayed feedback model of axonal length sensing.Biophysical journal · 2015Article
- Molecular mechanisms for microtubule length regulation by kinesin-8 and XMAP215 proteins.Interface focus · 2014Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Regulating physical size is an essential problem that biological organisms must solve from the subcellular to the organismal scales, but it is not well understood what physical principles and mechanisms organisms use to sense and regulate their size. Any biophysical size-regulation scheme operates in a noisy environment and must be robust to other cellular dynamics and fluctuations. This work develops theory of filament length regulation inspired by recent experiments on kinesin-8 motor proteins, which move with directional bias on microtubule filaments and alter microtubule dynamics. Purified kinesin-8 motors can depolymerize chemically-stabilized microtubules. In the length-dependent depolymerization model, the rate of depolymerization tends to increase with filament length, because long filaments accumulate more motors at their tips and therefore shorten more quickly. When balanced with a constant filament growth rate, this mechanism can lead to a fixed polymer length. However, the mechanism by which kinesin-8 motors affect the length of dynamic microtubules in cells is less clear. We study the more biologically realistic problem of microtubule dynamic instability modulated by a motor-dependent increase in the filament catastrophe frequency. This leads to a significant decrease in the mean filament length and a narrowing of the filament length distribution. The results improve our understanding of the biophysics of length regulation in cells.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.