ICYMI: Congratulations to our very own, Dr. Veronica Ciocanel and her group, on their new paper “Minimal Mechanisms of Microtubule Length Regulation in Living Cells.”
The goal was to understand what controls microtubule length in dendrites of Drosophila neurons. We used experimental measurements and a stochastic mathematical model to study mechanisms such as limited tubulin availability and the dependence of shrinking events on microtubule length.
These are needed since experimental parameters predict unbounded growth! They also developed a reduced deterministic model that informed their choices of parameters for the more complex stochastic model. We hope to use this to further understand how microtubules collectively organize into polarized structures in neurons.
Read more here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11538-024-01279-z
