Behaviors of individual microtubules and microtubule populations relative to critical concentrations: dynamic instability occurs when critical concentrations are driven apart by nucleotide hydrolysis

Abstract

We show that polymers displaying dynamic instability (DI) have at least two experimentally distinguishable critical concentrations (CCs), typical DI occurs between these two CCs, and the separation between the CCs depends on the NTP hydrolysis rate. We demonstrate how these CCs relate to various existing experimental and theoretical definitions of CC.