2025/10/15 by Chongbin Zheng, Jaime Agudo‐Canalejo, Zheng, Chongbin +5
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Physics and Astronomy · #Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Micro and Nano Robotics #Microtubule and mitosis dynamics #Nuclear Structure and Function
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.14109
openalex publication_date 2025/10/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Microtubules capture chromosomes during mitosis by stochastically switching between growth and shrinkage at catastrophe events. They display strikingly rich biochemistry and dynamics, regulated by a stabilizing cap with distinct conformational states. Microtubule lengths at catastrophe are observed to follow a peaked distribution, while their growth "stutters" briefly before catastrophe. Such complexity makes it hard to capture all these observations without a large number of tunable parameters. Here, we introduce a topological model of the microtubule cap that reproduces the features above through dynamical edge states, that provides a minimal description with just two free parameters. Our approach further provides an analytical description of catastrophes and allows the same features to persist over a wide range of tubulin concentration, consistent with experimental observations.