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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 37: Cell Mechanics and Migration

BP 37.1: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 9, 2016, 09:30–10:00, H44

Reconstituting basic mitotic spindles in artificial confinement — •Marileen Dogterom — Department of Bionanoscience, Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Microtubules are stiff dynamic polymers that can generate pushing and pulling forces by growing and shrinking. To fulfill their function, microtubules adopt specific spatial patterns, like the mitotic spindle during cell division. To understand the basic principles of mitotic spindle organization, we reconstitute a dynamic microtubule cytoskeleton inside three-dimensional water-in-oil emulsion droplets, using lipids that can be functionalized with dynein molecular motors. We then study the positioning of centrosomes, from which microtubules are nucleated that exert pushing and/or dynein-mediated pulling forces when reaching the boundary. We find that two centrosomes adopt an equilibrium position balancing a dynein-mediated centering effect with a repulsion force between the two centrosomes, thereby already reproducing a basic mitotic spindle like organization. We are now using this system as a platform to study how other essential spindle components affect the force balance of basic mitotic spindles.