2015/11/25

My network

Two days ago I made my own network! (Non-social, sorry ;)) It's been a "small" microtubuli network or probably rather a bunch of microtubuli clustered together without adding any crosslinker. It took about 2.5 hours and it was mostly pipetting and waiting for the incubation time to pass.

 
Green: Microtubuli, red: actin, blue: nucleus (wikipedia).

Microtubuli are long, stable polymers (... "long" on a cell scale...) which make up a large part of the cytoskeleton and are vital for the cell shape and in general the cell's well-being. There's a common cancer medication, taxol, which stabilizes microtubuli in the cancer cells, so that they can't divide and the cells die.

Actually, we used taxol as well, to stabilize our microtubuli: We began with tubulin which is the protein microtubuli are made of and started adding taxol in small steps to the buffer-tubulin solution. After adding taxol you have to wait for some time so that the taxol can spread out. Tubulin polymerizes to microtubuli (i.e. connecting in a non-trivial way to form long, stiff rods). Some of the tubulin proteins were labeled with a fluorescent dye so we could see them under our TIRF microscope! :)