User:Andy Maloney/Kinesin & Microtubule Page/Osmotic stress/Analysis of the gliding fishtailing and circling motions of native microtubules

Disclaimer

These are my notes on this paper. Please read the paper before reading my notes.

Native microtubules from squid giant axons.
They talk about 3 forms of microtubule motion:
- Gliding
- Fishtailing (When an end of the microtubule gets stuck and the rest of it starts to bend.)
- Circling
Opps. ar should be are in the second paragraph. Tsk tsk editor...There are lots of typos.
Yeah! VHS recording!
They talk about settling of microtubules and how it takes about 10 - 15 minutes.
- It's important to note that these guys are using native microtubules and not the polymerization of tubulin into microtubules. This means that they did not use casein to passivate their slides. They just homogenized the squid sauce and plopped it onto a glass slide.
They quote a minimum radius of curvature for the microtubules of 0.3 - 0.5 µm.
I have converted one of their tracks of a microtubule moving in a circular track. This is from figure 8. The marks in the images are supposed to be reference points indicating stationary points on their glass. The big blob on one end of the line is supposed to be some sort of stuck protein on the microtubule. I aligned the images to the bottom left reference point.

^{SJK 00:03, 20 January 2010 (EST)}

This is super bad ass. Since they were working with native microtubules and the sauce (i.e. all the excess junk in the cells they didn't get rid of) that comes with working with native stuff, this is indicating that circular tracks may have been caused by osmotic stress!
They discuss how they are able to see microtubules after many hours later in their slides.
Yeah, they conclude that microtubules don't move in cells.