Sunday, February 24, 2008

Mitosis and field potentials

From Microtubules

"For more than a century various investigators have noted similarities between the pattern of the mitotic spindle apparatus and the field geometry of electric and magnetic dipole moments. Cooper (1981) further proposed that the onset of mitosis is associated with a ferroelectric phase transition that establishes an axis of oscillation for the cellular polarization wave. The mitotic spindle apparatus would delineate the polarization field with microtubules lined up along the electric field lines. The poles would represent regions of the highest field intensity and the equatorial plane would provide a nodal manifold. The chromosome condensation during this transformation would, in this picture, be induced by the static dielectric polarization of the chromatin complex resulting from the cellular ferroelectric phase transition." (J.A. Tuszynski, 1997)

Reference

Tuszynski J. A., B. Trpisova, D. Sept and J. A. Brown. (1997). Selected physical issues in the structure and function of microtubules. J.Struct.Biol. 118, 94-106. doi:10.1006/jsbi.1997.3843