Dresden 2026 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 18: Active Matter III (joint session BP/CPP/DY)
DY 18.3: Talk
Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 10:00–10:15, BAR/SCHÖ
The energy cost to build a spindle — •Dongliang Zhang1, Xingbo Yang4, Jan Brugués2,1,3,4, and Frank Jülicher1,3,4 — 1Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany — 2Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany — 3Center for Systems Biology Dresden, Dresden, Germany — 4Physics of Life, Cluster of Excellence, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany
Spindle is a structure actively build from microtubules (MTs), and plays an important role for chromosome segregation during cell cycle. It's observed in experiments that the spindle size and shape depends on the cell level metabolic rate. In this work, we developed a minimal model that captures the active, energy-consuming processes such as MT turnover and active stress generation, which shows the energy cost for spindle mass maintenance and spindle-shape formation. We show that a spindle can be self-organized through these active processes. We aim to predict how the size and shape of the spindle depends on the energy input, and explain relative experimental phenomena, e.g. spindle shrinkage when the metabolism level is reduced.
Keywords: nonequilibrium thermodynamics; spindle; active droplet; nematic droplet; energetics