Abstract
Microtubules are the backbone of the cytoskeleton and vital to numerous cellular processes. The central dogma of microtubules is that all their functions are driven by dynamic instability, but its mechanism has remained unresolved for over 30 years because of conceptual difficulties inherent in the dominant GTP-cap framework. We present a physically rigorous structural mechanochemical model: dynamic instability is driven by non-equilibrium transitions between the bent (B), straight (S), and curved (C) forms of tubulin monomers and longitudinal interfaces in the two-dimensional lattice of microtubule. All the different phenomena (growth, shortening, catastrophe, rescue, and pausing) are controlled by the kinetic pathways for B↔S↔C transitions and corresponding energy landscapes. Different kinetics at minus end are due to different B↔S↔C pathways imposed by the polarity of microtubule lattice. This model enables us to reproduce all the observed phenomena of dynamic instability of purified tubulins in kinetic simulations.