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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 16: Posters: Cell adhesion, mechanics and migration
BP 16.24: Poster
Montag, 16. März 2015, 17:30–19:30, Poster A
Microtubule-based intracellular transport: a liquid crystal approach — •Marco Linke1,2, Vytaute Starkuviene-Erfle2, and Ulrich S. Schwarz1,2 — 1Institute for Theoretical Physics, Heidelberg University — 2BioQuant, Heidelberg University
Mammalian cells show great variability in cell shape and intracellular structure when grown on planar cell culture substrates with homogeneous protein coating. Therefore micropatterns are increasingly used to normalize their shape and structure, but a quantitative understanding of the resulting cellular organization is missing. In order to investigate the consequences for microtubule-based transport, here we model the microtubule cytoskeleton as a nematic liquid crystal and minimize the free energy functional considering biologically plausible boundary conditions. The resulting nematic director configuration describes the preferred transport direction inside the cell and is used to simulate vesicle transport from the cell periphery towards the perinuclear region. We compare the simulation results to experimental measurements of internalized integrin and investigate changes in the distributions caused by RNAi mediated knockdown of genes that are responsible for the regulation of endocytosis and intracellular transport.