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.