Dynamic and asymmetric fluctuations in the microtubule wall captured by high-resolution cryoelectron microscopy.

ABSTRACT: Microtubules are tubular polymers with essential roles in numerous cellular activities. Structures of microtubules have been captured at increasing resolution by cryo-EM. However, dynamic properties of the microtubule are key to its function, and this behavior has proved difficult to characterize at a structural level due to limitations in existing structure determination methods. We developed a high-resolution cryo-EM refinement method that divides an imaged microtubule into its constituent protofilaments, enabling deviations from helicity and other sources of heterogeneity to be quantified and corrected for at the single-subunit level. We demonstrate that this method improves the resolution of microtubule 3D reconstructions and substantially reduces anisotropic blurring artifacts, compar

SUBMITTER: Debs GE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7382274 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature