Organization and Dynamics of Growing Microtubule Plus Ends during Early Mitosis

Abstract

A stable cell line expressing EB1-green fluorescent protein was used to image growing microtubule plus ends at the G₂/M transition. By late prophase growing ends no longer extend to the cell periphery and were not uniformly distributed around each centrosome. Growing ends were much more abundant in the area surrounding the nuclear envelope, and microtubules growing around the nucleus were 1.5 fold longer than those growing in the opposite direction. The growth of longer ends toward the nucleus did not result from a localized faster growth rate, because this rate was ∼11 μm/min in all directions from the centrosome. Rather, microtubule ends growing toward the nucleus seemed stabilized by dynein/dynactin associated with the nuclear envelope. Injection of p50 into late prophase cells removed dynein from the nuclear envelope, reduced the density of growing ends near the nuclear envelope and resulted in a uniform distribution of growing ends from each centrosome. We suggest that the cell cycle-dependent binding of dynein/dynactin to the nuclear envelope locally stabilizes growing microtubules. Both dynein and microtubules would then be in a position to participate in nuclear envelope breakdown, as described in recent studies.