paper

We collaborated with the Detweiler lab to apply image quantification tools to their study of novel potential antibiotic compounds.

Recent work has shown that the C-terminal tail is particularly important to kinesin-5 motor function and mitotic spindle assembly. We characterized a series of kinesin-5/Cut7 tail truncation alleles in fission yeast. Our observations suggest that the C-terminal tail of Cut7p contributes to both sliding force and midzone localization.

We describe the Toolkit for Automated Microtubule Tracking (TAMiT), which automatically detects, optimizes, and tracks fluorescent microtubules in living yeast cells with sub-pixel accuracy. TAMiT detects linear and curved polymers using a geometrical scanning technique.

The kinesin-5 motor Cut7p on bipolar and monopolar spindles moves toward both plus and minus ends of microtubules. Notably, the activity of the motor increases at anaphase B onset. Comparison of Cut7 mutant and human Eg5 localization suggest a new hypothesis for the function of minus-end-directed motility and spindle-pole localization of kinesin-5s.

We show evidence for micron-scale communication between nanometer-sized motors.

A robotic excavating swarm with simple learning rules can mitigate jams.

We describe a new simulation framework for motor protein and crosslinker interaction with microtubules in a lattice model.

We explore different types of analytic models for crosslinkers and compare them to simulation.

We present Brownian dynamics simulation results of driven semiflexible filaments with intrinsic curvature and investigate how the interplay between filament rigidity and radius of curvature can tune the self-organization behavior in homochiral systems and heterochiral mixtures.

We use simulations of driven filaments with tunable soft repulsion and rigidity in order to better understand how the interplay between filament flexibility and steric effects can lead to different active steady states.