Computational Analysis of Microtubule Polymerization Interacting with an Anti-mitotic Drug

One of the cellular biofilaments involved in the process of cellular division is microtubules. The random behavior of microtubules during their polymerization is called dynamic instability. Dynamic parameters can be suppressed by anti-mitotic drugs such as Taxol. Knowing how fast these biofilaments grow while in the growing phase, how fast they disassemble while in the shrinking phase, and how frequent they switch from the growing to the shrinking phase, or inversely from the shrinking phase to the growing phase, the dynamic of them can be expressed through coupled partial differential equations. In this work, the dynamic of microtubules was numerically analyzed by Mathematica software. We first numerically investigate the polymerization behaviors of microtubules when they intrinsically show their dynamic instability. We then studied their dynamics when their dynamical parameters are suppressed by presumably an anti-mitotic drug with a stabilizing effect such as Taxol. Finally, the results of our computational analysis will be compared with those obtained from in vitro experiments on the dynamic of microtubules