Tracking the Effects of Cancer on Microtubule Dynamic Instability

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cancer affects microtubule dynamics and brain connectivity by combining molecular and whole-brain imaging, using nonlinear models to analyze the impact of microtubule-associated proteins on neural network function.

Contribution

It introduces a novel statistical approach to link microtubule behavior with brain connectivity changes in cancer, bridging cellular and network-level analysis.

Findings

Cancer alters microtubule dynamics and brain connectivity.

Regions with high complexity show distinct microtubule-associated activity.

The nonlinear model predicts spatiotemporal relationships between proteins and connectivity.

Abstract

Dynamic instability in the cytoskeleton underlies a great many vital cellular processes. In neurons, it is thought to play a role in information processing and the establishment of synaptic connections. It is from this interneuronal connectivity that the large-scale organization and function of the brain ultimately emerges. While brain networks above the cellular scale have been extensively investigated with medical imaging, no research has yet examined the contribution of the dynamic architecture subserving the components of these networks to their functionality. Simultaneous functional imaging at molecular and whole-brain scales may yield more comprehensive knowledge of this entailment. Procedures of statistical analysis based on a recently developed nonlinear model of microtubule dynamics are proposed to verify predictions about the spatiotemporal relationships between various microtubule-associated protein activities and functional connectivity. Known effects of brain cancer on functional connectivity and peritumoral complexity serve as the basis for a comparative study of these phenomena in regions of interest with particularly high and low complexity.