Mechanics of the cytoskeleton

Microtubules are hollow tubes assembled from tubulin proteins. They hold cells in shape, guide cell division and serve as tracks for transport, and to do any of this they have to resist and transmit forces. I study how their mechanical behaviour follows from their molecular architecture.

I combine atomistic molecular dynamics with network-based and coarse-grained models to connect the scale of single amino acids to the scale of the whole filament. Recent questions include how the number of protofilaments changes a microtubule’s stiffness, how mechanical signals travel through the lattice, and how a drug such as taxol alters these properties.