Exploring structural and dynamical properties of microtubules by means of artificial neural networks

Microtubules (MTs) are cylindrical polymers of the tubulin dimer, are constituents of all eukaryotic cells cytoskeleton and are involved in key cellular functions and are claimed to be involved as sub-cellular information or quantum information communication systems. The authors evaluated some biophysical properties of MTs by means of specific physical measures of resonance and birefringence in presence of electromagnetic field, on the assumption that when tubulin and MTs show different biophysical behaviours, this should be due to their special structural properties. Actually, MTs are the closest biological equivalent to the well-known carbon nanotubes (CNTs), whose interesting biophysical and quantum properties are due to their peculiar microscopic structure. The experimental results highlighted a physical behaviour of MTs in comparison with tubulin. The dynamic simulation of MT and tubulin subjected to electromagnetic field was performed via MD tools. Their level of self-organization was evaluated using artificial neural networks, which resulted to be an effective method to gather the dynamical behaviour of cellular and non-cellular structures and to compare their physical properties.