Microtubules are essential, dynamic polymers responsible for chromosome segregation. They also have key roles in organizing the interior of eukaryotic cells. Microtubules undergo dramatic rearrangements over the course of the cell cycle; they facilitate this remodeling by stochastically switching between growing and shrinking, a highly regulated but poorly understood behavior known as dynamic instability. Despite obvious importance and years of study, and even though pure αβ-tubulin alone forms dynamic polymers in vitro, physical insight into the molecular mechanisms generating and regulating dynamic microtubule behavior remains largely qualitative. Insights remain relatively scarce because microtubule dynamics is a complex time-dependent behavior resulting from collective interactions among several different proteins, and it is hard to understand complex behavior like this in terms of the biochemical properties of individual components. My lab is taking a multidisciplinary approach, using tools including structure determination, single-polymer kinetic measurements, and stochastic modeling. The ultimate goal is to integrate these and other sources of information to formulate a comprehensive molecular understanding of microtubule dynamics and its regulation.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Structural Biology
Microtubule dynamics
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Aldaz*, H., Rice*, L.M., Stearns, T., and Agard, D.A. (* equal contributions), "Insights into microtubule nucleation from the crystal structure of human γ-tubulin" Nature, 435:523-527, May 2005
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