RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Swirling Instability of the Microtubule Cytoskeleton JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2020.08.27.268318 DO 10.1101/2020.08.27.268318 A1 Stein, David B. A1 De Canio, Gabriele A1 Lauga, Eric A1 Shelley, Michael J. A1 Goldstein, Raymond E. YR 2020 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/08/27/2020.08.27.268318.abstract AB In the cellular phenomena of cytoplasmic streaming, molecular motors carrying cargo along a network of microtubules entrain the surrounding fluid. The piconewton forces produced by individual motors are sufficient to deform long microtubules, as are the collective fluid flows generated by many moving motors. Studies of streaming during oocyte development in the fruit fly D. melanogaster have shown a transition from a spatially-disordered cytoskeleton, supporting flows with only short-ranged correlations, to an ordered state with a cell-spanning vortical flow. To test the hypothesis that this transition is driven by fluid-structure interactions we study a discrete-filament model and a coarse-grained continuum theory for motors moving on a deformable cytoskeleton, both of which are shown to exhibit a swirling instability to spontaneous large-scale rotational motion, as observed.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.