Impact of Microtubule Network Complexity on Kinesin-Mediated Cargo Transport.

The long-distance transport of cargoes within cells is essential for maintaining their organization and proper function. The intricate cytoskeletal networks in large cells can exhibit remarkable complexity, significantly affecting the distance and trajectory of cargo transport. Different kinds of cells display distinct microtubule organizations; for example, neurons have long parallel tracks, epithelial cells possess a dense mesh of microtubules, and migrating cells feature dynamic microtubules. Our work focuses on recreating these complex environments of dense and dynamic microtubules to study the ability of single kinesins and teams of kinesins to transport small cargoes. We find that altering the mesh size of a stable microtubule network affects cargo displacement and denser networks introduce drag into the system. To increase the complexity of the microtubule networks, we create dynamics networks that can grow or disassemble in time. We add free tubulin under various initial conditions, we can control the maturation of the network. Adding destabilizers can cause the network to fall apart. These novel experiment provide new insights into whether cargo transport prefers a specific lattice structure and its ability to navigate diverse network conditions.