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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2011 Sep 1.
Published in final edited form as: J Cell Sci. 2008 Jan 15;121(Pt 2):196–204. doi: 10.1242/jcs.012666

Fig. 2. Microtubule tips dynamics at focal adhesions.

Fig. 2

A. Kymograph of a microtubule catastrophe event at focal adhesion (FA). Microtubule marked with mCherry-EB3 (red), focal adhesion marked with GFP-paxillin (green). B. Kymograph of a microtubule tip (mCherry-EB3, red) which does not undergo catastrophe at the adhesion (GFP-paxillin, green). Microtubule tip changes its growth dynamic at focal adhesion. C. An example of assigned area zones for microtubule growth path near focal adhesion (GFP-paxillin, green). Cytoplasmic zones close to the cell center encoded as zones -2 and -1. Zone adjacent to focal adhesion is encoded as zone 0. Focal adhesion contains zones 1–3, according to its length. Cytoplasmic zones towards the cell periphery are encoded as zones 1out and 2out. Each zone is 1 μm in size. D. Distribution between fast (growth rate >0.1 μm/s) and slow (growth rate <0.1 μm/s) microtubules for each zone. In cytoplasm (yellow background) ~ 70% of microtubules grow with the speed 0.1μm/second or faster. At focal adhesion (green background) percentage of fast microtubule reduces down to ~50%. E. Dependence of microtubule catastrophe ratio (percent of approaching microtubules undergo catastrophe) of time microtubule spends in cytoplasm zone (zone -1, green), at adhesion base (zone 0, blue) and in adhesion (zone 1, red). F. Total microtubule catastrophe ratio for each zone. Percent of approaching microtubules undergo catastrophe increases from 2% in cytoplasm to 25% at focal adhesion. Total of 139 microtubules in 3 3xGFP-EMTB and mCherry-paxillin cells within 15 minutes were quantified. Scale bar 1μm.