Becker's World of the Cell 9th Edition by Lewis Kleinsmith, Jeff Hardin, Gregory Paul Bertoni

Exercise 3

QUANTITATIVE Microtubule Mania. For each study involving microtubules, explain the results.
(a)You repeat the experiment showm in Figure 13-4 in your cell biology laboratory class, but you add a small amount of nocodazole to the preparation. Describe the graph you expect, comparing it to Figure 13-4.
(b)When an animal cell is treated with colchicine, its microtubules depolymerize and virtually disappear. If the colchicine is then washed away, the MTs appear again, beginning at the centrosome and elongating outward.
(c)Extracts from nondividing frog eggs contain structures that can induce the polymerization of tubulin into microtubules in vitro. When examined by immunostaining, the induced microtubules contain -tubulin.