Jonathon Howard

Jonathon Howard, MPI-CBG Dresden We are interested in the mechanisms that microtubules and their motors play in cell morphology and motility. For example, how do the dynamic properties of microtubules drive spindle and chromosome movements in mitosis, and how does dynein drive axonemal motility? What roles do microtubules and their motors play in mechanoreception in sensory cells and in determining the shapes of cells? What makes these problems so fascinating is that somehow molecules, whose dimension is on the order of nanometers, coordinate the assembly or movement of structures whose dimension is on the order of the size of the cell, some thousand to million times larger than molecular dimensions. The key to answering these questions is to characterise the interactions between the individual molecules in vitro, to use theory to understand how these interactions lead to the collective behavior of the ensemble of molecules, and then to test these models with in vivo experiments.