Microtubules are intracellular filaments, responsible for shuttling cargo throughout the cellular interior. When viewed under the microscope in the presence of ATP, microtubules can be observed slowly growing, then rapidly collapsing, as they explore the environment around them.
This latter feat -- rapid collapse -- is a process known as "microtubule catastrophe". To explore this phenomenon in a quantitative manner, Melissa K. Gardner, Marija Zanic, Christopher Gell, Volker Bormuth and Jonathan Howard performed experiments that uncovered a role for the kinesins, Kip3 and MCAK, in controlling microtubule catastrophe.
The paper is by Gardner MK, et al. "Depolymerizing Kinesins Kip3 and MCAK Shape Cellular Microtubule Architecture by Differential Control of Catastrophe" Cell (2011).
In this repository, there is a package that holds functions necessary for the critical analysis of the datasets presented by Gardner MK, et al. The analysis folder contains worked-through notebooks of our data analysis pipeline.
Authors: Niko McCarty, Emanuel Flores-Bautista and Rebecca Wipfler
Many of the functions supplied in this GitHub repository were created by Justin Bois @justinbois // GitHub: https://github.com/justinbois. These functions were created as part of the course "BE/Bi 103a", which was offered at Caltech in the Fall of 2019.
Clone this repository with
git clone https://github.com/nmccarty3/micro_cat_29.git
Navigate to the new directory and install with
pip install -e .
for a dynamic, editable package.
Or, run
python setup.py install
for a more static build. (You can upgrade the package as it's updated and pulled from GitHub with the same command.)