Cytoskeletal scaffold provides shape, motility, organelle arrangement, chromosomic segregation or intracellular cargo transport to living cells. Microtubules (MTs) are major composers of eukaryotic cytoskeleton, interlinking with other filamentous cytoskeletal networks such as those formed by actin or intermediate filaments. The MTs are intrinsically polar structures, displaying a relatively stable minus (-) tip and a highly dynamic plus (+) tip, which undergoes continuous transitions between polymerization and collapse events. This MT plus-end dynamic instability determines the growth and stability of MT networks, and it is regulated by an expanding interactome that also bridges MTs to other cytoskeletal and cellular structures. In addition, genes encoding for MT-structural or associated proteins are risk factors for important human diseases and syndromes, including developmental malformations, degenerative pathologies or cancer. For these reasons, the study of the MT arrangements and plus-end dynamics has gained scientific interest during the last decades, and numerous technical resources aimed to deep on its comprehension, visualization and analysis have been implemented. The objective of this collection is 1) to bring together protocols on MT research across different experimental systems in order to seek unexplored methods applicability, and 2) to favour the interdisciplinary transfer of hypothesis and work models to raise new molecular functions by known MT-regulatory proteins or unknown players in MT dynamics.
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Cited by 7
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2022
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STADIA- a machine-learning-based tool for characterizing dynamic instability
Archita Bhattacharya*1,
Sayandeepa Raha*1,
Holly Goodson*1
1University of Notre Dame