ArticleeLife2016
Physical basis of large microtubule aster growth.
Article in eLife, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Human mitotic spindles as active liquid crystals: From collective behaviors to discrete filaments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Branching, crosslinking, and decentralization of microtubules accelerates intracellular assembly.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- Episodic transport of protein aggregates achieves a positive size selectivity in aggresome formation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Neurons exploit stochastic growth to rapidly and economically build dense dendritic arbors.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Acentrosomal spindles assemble from branching microtubule nucleation near chromosomes in Xenopus laevis egg extract.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Dynein-dependent collection of membranes defines the architecture and position of microtubule asters in isolated, geometrically confined volumes of cell-free extracts.Molecular biology of the cell · 2022Article
- Multiple asters organize the yolk microtubule network during dclk2-GFP zebrafish epiboly.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Review
- Self-Organization of Cellular Units.Annual review of cell and developmental biology · 2021Review
- Review
- Spatial variation of microtubule depolymerization in large asters.Molecular biology of the cell · 2021Article
- Article
- Article
- Microtubule-dependent pushing forces contribute to long-distance aster movement and centration inMolecular biology of the cell · 2020Article
- Cell Biology: Social Distancing of Microtubule Ends Increases Their Assembly Rates.Current biology : CB · 2020Article
- Microtubule Growth Rates Are Sensitive to Global and Local Changes in Microtubule Plus-End Density.Current biology : CB · 2020Article
- Behaviors of individual microtubules and microtubule populations relative to critical concentrations: dynamic instability occurs when critical concentrations are driven apart by nucleotide hydrolysis.Molecular biology of the cell · 2020Article
- Review
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3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Microtubule asters - radial arrays of microtubules organized by centrosomes - play a fundamental role in the spatial coordination of animal cells. The standard model of aster growth assumes a fixed number of microtubules originating from the centrosomes. However, aster morphology in this model does not scale with cell size, and we recently found evidence for non-centrosomal microtubule nucleation. Here, we combine autocatalytic nucleation and polymerization dynamics to develop a biophysical model of aster growth. Our model predicts that asters expand as traveling waves and recapitulates all major aspects of aster growth. With increasing nucleation rate, the model predicts an explosive transition from stationary to growing asters with a discontinuous jump of the aster velocity to a nonzero value. Experiments in frog egg extract confirm the main theoretical predictions. Our results suggest that asters observed in large fish and amphibian eggs are a meshwork of short, unstable microtubules maintained by autocatalytic nucleation and provide a paradigm for the assembly of robust and evolvable polymer networks.
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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.