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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 5: Posters: Biopolymers and Biomaterials

BP 5.33: Poster

Montag, 22. März 2010, 17:15–20:00, Poster B1

A strong structural instability in the microtubule lattice revealed by imaging and molecularly reconstructing the inside of flattened microtubules — •Jan Kleeblatt, Florian Hagene, Iwan A.T. Schaap, and Christoph F. Schmidt — Drittes Physikalisches Institut, Fakultät für Physik, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Microtubules (MT) are an important part of the cytoskeleton. In the living cell microtubules are non-equilibrium polymers with complex chemical and mechanical properties. These properties are likely to be strongly influenced by microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs). We have here used atomic force microscopy to image MAPs (Clip 170) and the MT fine structure. We found evidence for an intriguing structural instability in microtubules which leads to a zig-zag pattern of protofilaments in MTs that are flattened inside-out against the substrate surface. We perfomed molecular reconstructions based on the tubulin atomic structure to model our results in terms of the local arrangement of tubulin monomers in neighboring protofilaments.