ArticleeLife2018
Microtubules soften due to cross-sectional flattening.
Article in eLife, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Enhanced processivity and collective force production of kinesin-1 at low radial forces.eLife · 2026Article
- Analyses of bent spindles reveal the mechanics of anaphase B in fission yeast.Molecular biology of the cell · 2026Article
- SSNA1 mechanically reinforces the damaged microtubule lattice.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Enhanced Processivity and Collective Force Production of Kinesin-1 at Low Radial Forces.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Microtubules in Martini: Parameterizing a heterogeneous elastic-network towards a mechanically accurate microtubule.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Structural switching of tubulin in the microtubule lattice.Biochemical Society transactions · 2025Review
- Bonded straight and helical flagellar filaments form ultra-low-density glasses.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The rate of microtubule breaking increases exponentially with curvature.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Exploring the Effect of Mechanical Anisotropy of Protein Structures in the Unfoldase Mechanism of AAA+ Molecular Machines.Nanomaterials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Directly Measuring Forces within Reconstituted Active Microtubule Bundles.Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE · 2022Article
- Primary cilium: a paradigm for integrating mathematical modeling with experiments and numerical simulations in mechanobiology.Mathematical biosciences and engineering : MBE · 2021Article
- Microtubule instability driven by longitudinal and lateral strain propagation.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Three-dimensional organization of the cytoskeleton: A cryo-electron tomography perspective.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2020Review
- Primary cilia have a length-dependent persistence length.Biomechanics and modeling in mechanobiology · 2020Article
- Cracking failure of curved hollow tree trunks.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Optical Tweezers Approaches for Probing Multiscale Protein Mechanics and Assembly.Frontiers in molecular biosciences · 2020Review
- The model of local axon homeostasis - explaining the role and regulation of microtubule bundles in axon maintenance and pathology.Neural development · 2019Review
- Cryo-EM of dynein microtubule-binding domains shows how an axonemal dynein distorts the microtubule.eLife · 2019Article
- From isolated structures to continuous networks: A categorization of cytoskeleton-based motile engineered biological microstructures.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Nanomedicine and nanobiotechnology · 2019Review
- Human β-Tubulin Isotypes Can Regulate Microtubule Protofilament Number and Stability.Developmental cell · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We use optical trapping to continuously bend an isolated microtubule while simultaneously measuring the applied force and the resulting filament strain, thus allowing us to determine its elastic properties over a wide range of applied strains. We find that, while in the low-strain regime, microtubules may be quantitatively described in terms of the classical Euler-Bernoulli elastic filament, above a critical strain they deviate from this simple elastic model, showing a softening response with increasingdeformations. A three-dimensional thin-shell model, in which the increased mechanical compliance is caused by flattening and eventual buckling of the filament cross-section, captures this softening effect in the high strain regime and yields quantitative values of the effective mechanical properties of microtubules. Our results demonstrate that properties of microtubules are highly dependent on the magnitude of the applied strain and offer a new interpretation for the large variety in microtubule mechanical data measured by different methods.
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Registered trials
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