2008/07/14 by Igor M. Kulić, André EX Brown, André E. X. Brown +9 · 3 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Physics and Astronomy · #Cellular transport and secretion #Microtubule and mitosis dynamics #Nuclear Structure and Function #physics.bio-ph #q-bio.SC
paper · pdf · doi:10.1073/pnas.0800031105
published as Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. (2008) 105:10011-10016 · 24 pages, 5 figures
openalex publication_date 2008/07/14 · arxiv created 2008/08/12 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
We study the role of microtubule movement in bidirectional organelle transport in Drosophila S2 cells and show that EGFP-tagged peroxisomes in cells serve as sensitive probes of motor induced, noisy cytoskeletal motions. Multiple peroxisomes move in unison over large time windows and show correlations with microtubule tip positions, indicating rapid microtubule fluctuations in the longitudinal direction. We report the first high-resolution measurement of longitudinal microtubule fluctuations performed by tracing such pairs of co-moving peroxisomes. The resulting picture shows that motor-dependent longitudinal microtubule oscillations contribute significantly to cargo movement along microtubules. Thus, contrary to the conventional view, organelle transport cannot be described solely in terms of cargo movement along stationary microtubule tracks, but instead includes a strong contribution from the movement of the tracks.