Influence of cytoskeletal dynamics on intracellular transport mediated by molecular motors.

CARLA PALLAVICINI; VALERIA LEVI; DIANA WETZLER; MARCELO A. DESPÓSITO; LUCIANA BRUNO

Buenos Aires

Congreso; rd South American Workshop and Inernational Gregorio Weber Conference on New Trends in Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy.; 2011

The cytoskeleton is a three-dimensional arrangement of proteins within cells which provides internal support for the cell as well as internal organization of its structures. Active transport of large vesicles and organelles requires molecular motors which use the cytoskeleton as ?tracks? for the processive motion. Typically, studies of intracellular transport were based on the assumption that the cytoskeletal network acted as rigid, static corridors on which molecular motors move. However, recent works have shown that this is not the case; that the cytoskeleton displays very rich dynamics which should be taken into account when studying transport mediated by molecular motors. Our goal is to study and model this dynamics and investigate its influence on intracellular transport, in order to understand how the final destination of transported bodies is determined. In this work we present preliminary results based on a theoretical and computational approach used to analyze movies of fluorescently tagged cytoskeletal structures in Xenopus laevis melanocytes. To this end, first we design an algorithm able to identify the filaments by image processing. Then, we decompose the filament shape in Fourier modes and analyze its deformation dynamics by means of the dynamics of the mode amplitudes. To test the effectiveness of the analytical and programming tools used to analyze the filament´s shape, we apply the analytical tools to numerically simulated filaments.