Working strokes produced by curling protofilaments at disassembling microtubule tips can be biochemically tuned and vary with species
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eLife assessment
The authors measure the work output of shrinking mammalian microtubules, reporting results of fundamental importance that advance our mechanistic understanding of how shrinking microtubules exert forces on chromosomes during cell division. Carefully performed, technically advanced experiments and model-based quantitative data analysis provide compelling evidence for the authors' conclusions. This work will be of interest for cell biologists interested in cell division, biophysicists interested in force production by biopolymers, and structural biologists interested in microtubule dynamics.
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Abstract
The disassembly of microtubules can generate force and drive intracellular motility. During mitosis, for example, chromosomes remain persistently attached via kinetochores to the tips of disassembling microtubules, which pull the sister chromatids apart. According to the conformational wave hypothesis, such force generation requires that protofilaments curl outward from the disassembling tips to exert pulling force directly on kinetochores. Rigorously testing this idea will require modifying the mechanical and energetic properties of curling protofilaments, but no way to do so has yet been described. Here, by direct measurement of working strokes generated in vitro by curling protofilaments, we show that their mechanical energy output can be increased by adding magnesium, and that yeast microtubules generate larger and more energetic working strokes than bovine microtubules. Both the magnesium and species-dependent increases in work output can be explained by lengthening the protofilament curls, without any change in their bending stiffness or intrinsic curvature. These observations demonstrate how work output from curling protofilaments can be tuned and suggest evolutionary conservation of the amount of curvature strain energy stored in the microtubule lattice.
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Author Response
Reviewer #1 (Public Review):
In a very interesting and technically advanced study, the authors measured the force production of curved protofilaments at depolymerizing mammalian microtubule ends using an optical trap assay that they developed previously for yeast microtubules. They found that the magnesium concentration affects this force production, which they argue based on a theoretical model is due to affecting the length of the protofilament curls, as observed previously by electron microscopy. Comparing with their previous force measurements, they conclude that mammalian microtubules produce smaller force pulses than yeast microtubules due to shorter protofilament curls. This work provides new mechanistic insight into how shrinking microtubules exert forces on cargoes such as for example kinetochores during cell …
Author Response
Reviewer #1 (Public Review):
In a very interesting and technically advanced study, the authors measured the force production of curved protofilaments at depolymerizing mammalian microtubule ends using an optical trap assay that they developed previously for yeast microtubules. They found that the magnesium concentration affects this force production, which they argue based on a theoretical model is due to affecting the length of the protofilament curls, as observed previously by electron microscopy. Comparing with their previous force measurements, they conclude that mammalian microtubules produce smaller force pulses than yeast microtubules due to shorter protofilament curls. This work provides new mechanistic insight into how shrinking microtubules exert forces on cargoes such as for example kinetochores during cell division. The experiments are sophisticated and appear to be of high quality, conclusions are well supported by the data, and language is appropriate when conclusions are drawn from more indirect evidence. Given that the experimental setup differs from the previous optical trap assay (antibody plus tubulin attached to bead versus only antibody attached to bead), a control experiment could be useful with yeast microtubules using the same protocol used in the new variant of the assay, or at least a discussion regarding this issue. One open question may be whether the authors can be sure that measured forces are only due to single depolymerizing protofilaments instead of two or more protofilaments staying laterally attached for a while. How would this affect the interpretation of the data?
This work will be of interest to cell biologists and biophysicists interested in spindle mechanics or generally in filament mechanics.
Thank you for your careful reading of our manuscript, your kind remarks, and your favorable review.
Reviewers #1 and #2 both mentioned a concern about potential differences between our previous setup with yeast microtubules, versus our new setup with predominantly bovine microtubules, and whether such differences might underlie the different pulse amplitudes we measured. We think this concern comes mainly from a misunderstanding of how the beads in both setups were tethered to the sides of the microtubules, and we apologize for not making this aspect clearer in our original submission.
It is true that our new setup requires one additional step, pre-decoration of the anti-His beads with His6-tagged yeast tubulin. However, in both cases, the anti-His antibodies were kept very sparse on the beads to ensure that most beads, if they became tethered to a microtubule, were attached by a single antibody. (~30 pM beads were mixed with 30 pM of anti-His antibody, for a molar ratio of 1:1.) And even though the anti-His beads in our previous work did not undergo a separate incubation step for pre-decoration with tubulin, they undoubtedly were decorated immediately after being mixed into the microtubule growth mix, which in that case included ~1 µM of unpolymerized His6-tagged yeast tubulin dimers. Thus, the arrangement with beads tethered laterally to the sides of microtubules via single antibodies was created in both cases by essentially the same three-step process: First, beads decorated very sparsely with anti-His antibodies were bound to unpolymerized His6-tagged yeast tubulin. Second, a bead-tethered His6-tagged yeast tubulin was incorporated into the growing tip of a microtubule (which could be assembling from either yeast or bovine tubulin, depending on the experiment). Third, the tip grew past the bead to create a large extension. Because the beads in both scenarios were tethered by a single antibody to the same C-terminal tail of yeast β-tubulin, the differences in pulse amplitude cannot be explained by differences in the tethering. In our revised manuscript, we now mention explicitly in Results that the beads were tethered by single antibodies (lines 95 to 100). In Methods we significantly expanded the section about preparation of beads and how they became tethered (lines 365 to 393). [We refer here, and below, to line numbers when the document is viewed with “All Markup” shown.]
You also raise an interesting, open question: Do protofilaments curl outward entirely independently of their lateral neighbors? Or under some conditions might they tend to stay laterally associated during the curling process, perhaps curling outward in pairs rather than as individual protofilaments? We cannot formally rule out the possibility that such lateral associations sometimes persist during protofilament curling. However, changes in lateral association seem unlikely to explain the magnesium- and species-dependent differences we measured in pulse amplitude, for several reasons: First, there is good evidence for lengthening of protofilament curls at disassembling tips (e.g., Mandelkow 1991, Tran & Salmon 1997), but we are not aware of convincing evidence for magnesium or species-dependent increases in the propensity of curling protofilaments to remain laterally associated. Second, an increase in lateral association should increase the effective flexural rigidity of the curls, but under all the conditions we examined, pulse enlargement was associated with a steepening of the amplitude-vs-force relation – i.e., with softening, not stiffening. Our model indicates that this softening can be fully explained by an increase in protofilament contour length, without any change in the intrinsic flexural rigidity of the protofilament curls.
Reviewer #2 (Public Review):
Microtubules are regarded as dynamic tracks for kinesin and dynein motors that generate force for moving cargoes through cells, but microtubules also act as motors themselves by generating force from outward splaying protofilaments at depolymerizing ends. Force from depolymerization has been demonstrated in vitro and is thought to contribute to chromosome movement and other contexts in cells. Although this model has been in the field for many years, key questions have remained unanswered, including the mechanism of force generation, how force generated might be regulated in cells, and how this system might be tuned across cellular contexts or organisms. The barrier is that we lack an understanding of experimental conditions that can be used to control protofilament shape and energetics. This study by Murray and colleagues makes an important advance towards overcoming that barrier.
This study builds on previous work from the authors where they developed a system to directly measure forces generated by outward curling protofilaments at depolymerizing microtubule ends. That study showed for the first time that protofilaments act like elastic springs and related the generated force to the estimated energy contained in the microtubule lattice. Furthermore, they showed that slowing polymerization rate did not diminish force generation. That study used recombinant yeast tubulin, including a 6x histidine tag on beta tubulin that created attachment points for the bead on the microtubule lattice. The current study extends that system to show that work output is related to the length of protofilament curls.
We are grateful for your very thoughtful and thorough review, which has helped us improve our manuscript.
Murray and colleagues show this by manipulating curls in two ways - using bovine brain tubulin instead of yeast tubulin and altering magnesium concentration. Previous EM studies indicated that protofilaments on depolymerizing bovine microtubules have similar curvature but are shorter. The authors here use a blend of bovine brain tubulin and bead-linked recombinant yeast tubulin with the 6x histidine tag in their in vitro system and find smaller deflections of the laser-trapped bead than previously observed with pure yeast tubulin. A concern with comparing this heterogeneous bovine/yeast system to the previous work with homogeneous yeast tubulin is that density of 6x histidine-tagged tubulin subunits is likely to be different between the two systems. Also, the rate of incorporation of 6x histidine yeast tubulin into bovine microtubules in the current study may be different from the rate of incorporation into yeast microtubules in the previous study. These differences could lead to changes in the strength of bead attachment to the microtubule lattice and alter the compliance of the bead to deflection by curling protofilaments. These possibilities and lattice attachment strength are not explored in this study, raising concerns about comparing the two systems.
Reviewers #1 and #2 both mentioned a concern about potential differences between our previous setup with yeast microtubules, versus our new setup with predominantly bovine microtubules, and whether such differences might underlie the different pulse amplitudes we measured. As detailed in our response to Reviewer #1 above, we think this concern comes mainly from a misunderstanding of how the beads in both setups were tethered to the sides of the microtubules, and we apologize for not making this aspect clearer in our original submission. For both our yeast and bovine microtubule experiments, the anti-His antibodies were kept very sparse on the beads to ensure that most beads, if they became tethered to a microtubule, were attached by a single antibody. Because the beads in both scenarios were tethered by a single antibody to the same C-terminal tail of yeast β-tubulin, the differences in pulse amplitude cannot be explained by differences in the tethering. In our revised manuscript, we now mention explicitly in Results that the beads were tethered by single antibodies (lines 95 to 100). In Methods we significantly expanded the section about preparation of beads and how they became tethered (lines 365 to 393).
The authors go on to show that magnesium increases bead deflection and work output from the system. The use of magnesium was motivated by earlier studies which showed that increasing magnesium speeds up depolymerization and increases the lengths of protofilament curls. The use of magnesium here provides the first evidence that work output can be tuned biochemically. This is an important finding. The authors then go on to show that the effect of magnesium on bead deflection can be separated from its effect on depolymerization speed. They do this by proteolytically removing the beta tubulin tail domain, which previous studies had shown to be necessary to mediate the magnesium effect on depolymerization rate. The authors arrive at a conclusion that magnesium must promote protofilament work output by increasing their lengths. How magnesium might do this remains unanswered. The mechanistic insight from the magnesium experiments ends there, but the authors discuss possible roles for magnesium in strengthening longitudinal interactions within protofilaments or perhaps complexing with the GDP nucleotide at the exchangeable site, although that seems less likely at the concentrations in these experiments.
The major conclusion of the study is the finding that work output from curling protofilaments is a tunable system. The examples here demonstrate tuning by tubulin composition and by divalent cations. Whether these examples relate to tuning in biological systems will be an important next question and could expand our appreciation for the versatility of depolymerizing microtubules as a motor.
We fully agree that two very important next questions are whether work output from curling protofilaments is truly harnessed in vivo, and whether protofilament properties in vivo might be actively regulated for this purpose. Based on your recommendations, and as detailed below (under Major point 2), we have expanded our discussion of these possibilities in our revised manuscript.
Reviewer #3 (Public Review):
The authors used a previously established optical tweezers-based assay to measure the regulation of the working stroke of curled protofilaments of bovine microtubules by magnesium. To do so, the authors improved the assay by attaching bovine microtubules to trapping beads through an incorporated tagged yeast tubulin.
The assay is state-of-the-art and provides a direct measurement of the stroke size of protofilaments and its dependence on magnesium.
The authors have achieved all their goals and the manuscript is well written.
The reported findings will be of high interest for the cell biology community.
Thank you for reading and evaluating our manuscript. We are grateful for your positive comments.
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eLife assessment
The authors measure the work output of shrinking mammalian microtubules, reporting results of fundamental importance that advance our mechanistic understanding of how shrinking microtubules exert forces on chromosomes during cell division. Carefully performed, technically advanced experiments and model-based quantitative data analysis provide compelling evidence for the authors' conclusions. This work will be of interest for cell biologists interested in cell division, biophysicists interested in force production by biopolymers, and structural biologists interested in microtubule dynamics.
-
Reviewer #1 (Public Review):
In a very interesting and technically advanced study, the authors measured the force production of curved protofilaments at depolymerizing mammalian microtubule ends using an optical trap assay that they developed previously for yeast microtubules. They found that the magnesium concentration affects this force production, which they argue based on a theoretical model is due to affecting the length of the protofilament curls, as observed previously by electron microscopy. Comparing with their previous force measurements, they conclude that mammalian microtubules produce smaller force pulses than yeast microtubules due to shorter protofilament curls. This work provides new mechanistic insight into how shrinking microtubules exert forces on cargoes such as for example kinetochores during cell division. The …
Reviewer #1 (Public Review):
In a very interesting and technically advanced study, the authors measured the force production of curved protofilaments at depolymerizing mammalian microtubule ends using an optical trap assay that they developed previously for yeast microtubules. They found that the magnesium concentration affects this force production, which they argue based on a theoretical model is due to affecting the length of the protofilament curls, as observed previously by electron microscopy. Comparing with their previous force measurements, they conclude that mammalian microtubules produce smaller force pulses than yeast microtubules due to shorter protofilament curls. This work provides new mechanistic insight into how shrinking microtubules exert forces on cargoes such as for example kinetochores during cell division. The experiments are sophisticated and appear to be of high quality, conclusions are well supported by the data, and language is appropriate when conclusions are drawn from more indirect evidence. Given that the experimental setup differs from the previous optical trap assay (antibody plus tubulin attached to bead versus only antibody attached to bead), a control experiment could be useful with yeast microtubules using the same protocol used in the new variant of the assay, or at least a discussion regarding this issue. One open question may be whether the authors can be sure that measured forces are only due to single depolymerizing protofilaments instead of two or more protofilaments staying laterally attached for a while. How would this affect the interpretation of the data?
This work will be of interest to cell biologists and biophysicists interested in spindle mechanics or generally in filament mechanics. -
Reviewer #2 (Public Review):
Microtubules are regarded as dynamic tracks for kinesin and dynein motors that generate force for moving cargoes through cells, but microtubules also act as motors themselves by generating force from outward splaying protofilaments at depolymerizing ends. Force from depolymerization has been demonstrated in vitro and is thought to contribute to chromosome movement and other contexts in cells. Although this model has been in the field for many years, key questions have remained unanswered, including the mechanism of force generation, how force generated might be regulated in cells, and how this system might be tuned across cellular contexts or organisms. The barrier is that we lack an understanding of experimental conditions that can be used to control protofilament shape and energetics. This study by Murray …
Reviewer #2 (Public Review):
Microtubules are regarded as dynamic tracks for kinesin and dynein motors that generate force for moving cargoes through cells, but microtubules also act as motors themselves by generating force from outward splaying protofilaments at depolymerizing ends. Force from depolymerization has been demonstrated in vitro and is thought to contribute to chromosome movement and other contexts in cells. Although this model has been in the field for many years, key questions have remained unanswered, including the mechanism of force generation, how force generated might be regulated in cells, and how this system might be tuned across cellular contexts or organisms. The barrier is that we lack an understanding of experimental conditions that can be used to control protofilament shape and energetics. This study by Murray and colleagues makes an important advance towards overcoming that barrier.
This study builds on previous work from the authors where they developed a system to directly measure forces generated by outward curling protofilaments at depolymerizing microtubule ends. That study showed for the first time that protofilaments act like elastic springs and related the generated force to the estimated energy contained in the microtubule lattice. Furthermore, they showed that slowing polymerization rate did not diminish force generation. That study used recombinant yeast tubulin, including a 6x histidine tag on beta tubulin that created attachment points for the bead on the microtubule lattice. The current study extends that system to show that work output is related to the length of protofilament curls.
Murray and colleagues show this by manipulating curls in two ways - using bovine brain tubulin instead of yeast tubulin and altering magnesium concentration. Previous EM studies indicated that protofilaments on depolymerizing bovine microtubules have similar curvature but are shorter. The authors here use a blend of bovine brain tubulin and bead-linked recombinant yeast tubulin with the 6x histidine tag in their in vitro system and find smaller deflections of the laser-trapped bead than previously observed with pure yeast tubulin. A concern with comparing this heterogeneous bovine/yeast system to the previous work with homogeneous yeast tubulin is that density of 6x histidine-tagged tubulin subunits is likely to be different between the two systems. Also, the rate of incorporation of 6x histidine yeast tubulin into bovine microtubules in the current study may be different from the rate of incorporation into yeast microtubules in the previous study. These differences could lead to changes in the strength of bead attachment to the microtubule lattice and alter the compliance of the bead to deflection by curling protofilaments. These possibilities and lattice attachment strength are not explored in this study, raising concerns about comparing the two systems.
The authors go on to show that magnesium increases bead deflection and work output from the system. The use of magnesium was motivated by earlier studies which showed that increasing magnesium speeds up depolymerization and increases the lengths of protofilament curls. The use of magnesium here provides the first evidence that work output can be tuned biochemically. This is an important finding. The authors then go on to show that the effect of magnesium on bead deflection can be separated from its effect on depolymerization speed. They do this by proteolytically removing the beta tubulin tail domain, which previous studies had shown to be necessary to mediate the magnesium effect on depolymerization rate. The authors arrive at a conclusion that magnesium must promote protofilament work output by increasing their lengths. How magnesium might do this remains unanswered. The mechanistic insight from the magnesium experiments ends there, but the authors discuss possible roles for magnesium in strengthening longitudinal interactions within protofilaments or perhaps complexing with the GDP nucleotide at the exchangeable site, although that seems less likely at the concentrations in these experiments.
The major conclusion of the study is the finding that work output from curling protofilaments is a tunable system. The examples here demonstrate tuning by tubulin composition and by divalent cations. Whether these examples relate to tuning in biological systems will be an important next question and could expand our appreciation for the versatility of depolymerizing microtubules as a motor.
-
Reviewer #3 (Public Review):
The authors used a previously established optical tweezers-based assay to measure the regulation of the working stroke of curled protofilaments of bovine microtubules by magnesium. To do so, the authors improved the assay by attaching bovine microtubules to trapping beads through an incorporated tagged yeast tubulin.
The assay is state-of-the-art and provides a direct measurement of the stroke size of protofilaments and its dependence on magnesium.
The authors have achieved all their goals and the manuscript is well written.
The reported findings will be of high interest for the cell biology community.
-
