Damage and Failure of Axonal Microtubule under Extreme High Strain Rate: An In-Silico Molecular Dynamics Study.

ABSTRACT: As a major cytoskeleton element of the axon, the breaking of microtubules (MTs) has been considered as a major cause of the axon degeneration. High strain rate loading is considered as one of the key factors in microtubule breaking. Due to the small size of microtubule, the real-time behavior of microtubule breaking is hard to capture. This study employs fully-atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulation to determine the failure modes of microtubule under different loadings conditions such as, unidirectional stretching, bending and hydrostatic expansion. For each loading conditions, MT is subjected to extreme high strain rate (108-109 s-1) loading. We argue that such level of high strain rate may be realized during cavitation bubble implosion. For each loading type, we have determined the

SUBMITTER: Wu YT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6095851 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature