Rueangkham, N. orcid.org/0000-0002-4417-303X, Valle-Inclán Cabello, M., Lautenschläger, F. et al. (1 more author) (2025) Nuclear deformation by microtubule molecular motors. PLOS Computational Biology, 21 (5). e1012305. ISSN 1553-734X
Abstract
We present a model to calculate the displacement and extension of deformable cellular cargo pulled by molecular motors stepping along cytoskeletal filaments. We consider the case of a single type of molecular motor and cytoskeletal filaments oriented in one dimension in opposite directions on either side of a cargo. We model a deformable cargo as a simple elastic spring. We simulate this tug-of-war simple exclusion process model using a Monte Carlo Gillespie algorithm and calculate the displacement and extension of the cargo for different configurations of motors and filaments. We apply our model to kinesin-1 motors on microtubules to investigate whether they are strong enough to translocate and deform the largest cellular cargo, the nucleus. We show that the extension caused by motors on a single microtubule saturates for larger numbers of motors but that the extension and displacement scales linearly with the number of microtubules. We also show how the binding and unbinding behaviors of molecular motors on microtubule filaments affect the nuclear deformation. Our modelling results correspond to experiments on cells treated with the drug kinesore, which is thought to increase rescue events resulting in more stable microtubules and more active kinesin-1 molecular motors bound to them. Both the experiments and our simulations result in nuclear deformation.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Editors: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2025 Rueangkham et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
Keywords: | Information and Computing Sciences; Biochemistry and Cell Biology; Biological Sciences; Normal biological development and functioning; Generic health relevance |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 21 May 2025 10:39 |
Last Modified: | 21 May 2025 10:39 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
Identification Number: | 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012305 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:226931 |