A Landau-Ginzburg Model of the Co-existence of Free Tubulin and Assembled Microtubules in Nucleation and Oscillations Phenomena.
A link is shown between reaction-diffusion kinetics for microtubuleassembly and time-dependent Landau-Ginzburg phenomenology. In the latter,microtubule assembly is treated as a first-order phase transition using apostulated Landau-Ginzburg free energy expansion. The results establish aconnection between the oscillations observed in experiment and the phasediagram for microtubule assembly. The model also predicts a specific heatbehavior which could be verified experimentally.
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-036 U.S.A.
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Tuszyńskit
Microtubule assembly; phase diagram; tubulin concentration