Nogales Eva, Wang Hong-Wei
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Molecular and Cell Biology Department, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, 355 LSA UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3200, USA.
Curr Opin Cell Biol. 2006 Apr;18(2):179-84. doi: 10.1016/j.ceb.2006.02.009. Epub 2006 Feb 21.
Microtubules are cytoskeletal polymers made of repeating alphabeta-tubulin heterodimers that play essential roles in all eukaryotic cells. The complex dynamic behavior of microtubules, which is ultimately due to the tubulin subunit structure and its intrinsic GTPase activity, is key to the functions of these ubiquitous polymers. Microtubule assembly and disassembly do not take place by simple helical growth and shrinkage via individual subunits, but rather involve transient polymer intermediates, distinct from the microtubule, without parallel in other biological self-assembly systems. The discovery of these intermediates a decade ago has been followed recently by quantitative descriptions of their structure and their relationship to nucleotide state.
微管是由重复的αβ-微管蛋白异二聚体组成的细胞骨架聚合物，在所有真核细胞中发挥着重要作用。微管复杂的动态行为最终归因于微管蛋白亚基结构及其内在的GTP酶活性，这是这些普遍存在的聚合物发挥功能的关键。微管的组装和解聚并非通过单个亚基进行简单的螺旋式生长和收缩，而是涉及与微管不同的瞬时聚合物中间体，这在其他生物自组装系统中是不存在的。十年前发现这些中间体后，最近对它们的结构及其与核苷酸状态的关系进行了定量描述。
