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. 2020 Aug 12;10:13661. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-70602-0

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© This is a U.S. Government work and not under copyright protection in the US; foreign copyright protection may apply 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Model and experimental systems for examining microtubule depolymerization dynamics. (a) Coarse-grained models of tubulin dimers, which comprise wedge-shaped α- (blue, gold) and β-subunits (purple) that are either identical in shape (uncompressed dimers, left) or with α-subunits that are vertically compressed by angle θ (compressed dimers, right). Model wedges include lateral and vertical attractive sites that have color-specific interactions, where lateral sites are vertically offset across the wedges to stabilize the pitch-3 microtubule lattice. (b) Top portion (plus-end) of a full model microtubule containing 40% uncompressed dimers prior to depolymerization. Wedges are shaped such that thirteen vertical protofilaments fit in the lattice, representing the typical number of protofilaments in a typical microtubule in vivo. (c) Kymographs of TRITC-labeled microtubules with 0%, 40%, 70%, and 100% incorporated GMPCPP. Timescale are included on the left of each kymograph. All microtubules are displayed with the minus-end on the left and plus-end on the right. Scale bar correspond to 2 µm. (d) Full model microtubules composed of 0%, 40%, 70%, and 100% uncompressed dimers undergoing depolymerization.