This repository is a website for describing our data analysis work on microtubule catastrophe.

Microtubules are fundamental parts of eukaryotic cells and are necessary for many essential cellular processes. For example, they form the cytoskeleton to provide structure and shape to cells, allow intracellular transport, facilitate cell division by pulling chromosomes apart, form cilia and flagella, and much more. They are assembled through an event called nucleation by microtubule-organizing centers (MTOC) in which tubulin monomers are added on successively, causing lengthening of the microtubule. The microtubule dynamically switches between growing and shrinking. If the tubulin monomer is bound to GTP, this tubulin is considered stable and will stay on the microtubule, promoting further growth. On the other hand, if the tubulin is a GDP-bound tubulin due the GTP becoming hydrolyzing, the tubulin monomer will be unstable and fall off the microtubule. The result is rapid depolymerization of the microtubule, and this switch between growing and shrinking is termed “a catastrophe”. The kinetics of microtubule catastrophe are still largely unknown as there are likely to be multiple factors that modulate the mechanism and duration of this event. We contribute to elucidating these unknowns by attempting to understand how microtubule catastrophe time may be modeled. Here we analyze the time it takes for catastrophe to occur after growth begins of microtubules exposed to fluorescently labelled tubulin as well as various concentrations of tubulin in vitro, obtaining the data from Jonathon Howard’s Lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. We propose a model that we think may be appropriate to model microtubule catastrophe and compare it to a Gamma Distribution which other groups have proposed as the model. We ultimately observe that our proposed model is not more appropriate for microtubule catastrophe, disproving at least one theory of the mechanism of microtubule catastrophe.

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