Active Mechanics of Human Mitotic Spindles

The mitotic spindle is a self-organization subcellular structure that positions the cleavage plane during cell division and segregates the chromosomes. Spindles in human cells are composed of approximately ten thousand microtubules, as well as proteins which influence microtubule assembly and disassembly, molecular motors and cross-linkers. These constituents are highly dynamic due to ATP and GTP hydrolysis – microtubules continually slide relative to each other, and rapidly polymerize and depolymerize – making the spindle a fundamentally non-equilibrium structure. In this talk, I will describe ongoing work from my lab aimed at understanding how the active mechanics of human mitotic spindles arise from the collective behavior of their constituents and dictates their architecture, dynamics, and positioning, and chromosome segregation.