Design of self-organizing microtubule networks for molecular communication

In this paper, we investigated approaches to form a self-organizing microtubule network. Microtubules are protein filaments naturally occurring in the aqueous environment of cells. A microtubule network connects multiple nano- or micro-scale objects (i.e., nanomachines). In the paper, we propose two approaches to form an in vitro microtubule network in a self-organizing manner. The first approach utilizes polymerization and depolymerization of microtubules. The second approach utilizes molecular motors to reorganize a microtubule network. In addition, we conducted preliminary in vitro experiments to investigate the feasibility of the proposed approaches. In the preliminary experiments, we observed that a few sender and receiver nanomachines were interconnected with the first approach, and that distinct topologies of microtubules were reorganized with the second approach.