Kinetics and mechanism of microtubule length changes by dynamic instability

Microtubules at steady state were found to undergo dramatic changes in length, with only very little change in number concentration and mean length. This result is accounted for by a mechanism in which microtubules are capped at ends by tubulin-GTP subunits; loss of the tubulin-GTP cap at one end results in disassembly of all the tubulin-GDP subunits, so that the medial edge of the distal tubulin-GTP cap is exposed; the exposed tubulin-GTP cap is sufficiently stable, so that microtubule regrowth from the cap rather than loss of the cap occurs. This mechanism predicts that a bell-shaped length distribution of sheared microtubules will be transiently bimodal, with peaks of short and moderate length microtubules, in rearranging to an exponential length distribution. We have observed the predicted transient bimodal length distribution experimentally and in a Monte Carlo simulation. Dynamic instability has recently been accounted for by assuming that microtubule ends are capped with only a single tubulin-GTP subunit at each end of the five helices that serve as elongation sites. Such a minimal tubulin-GTP cap is apparently ruled out by our observations, which require that the remnant tubulin-GTP cap generated from disassembly be able to serve as nucleating site; we do not expect that a stable nucleating site can be generated from five tubulin-GTP subunits, oriented as the five helices that serve as elongation sites.