Fig. 6

SOFI reveals colcemid causes filament curvature and suppresses filament dynamics in live cells. a SOFI of live HeLa MTs labelled with MAP4-ffDronpa, imaged after 5 h treatment with the specific concentration of colcemid. Live cell MTs imaged with SOFI show a similar trend to fixed-cell MTs imaged with dSTORM. Aberrant filament curvatures were observed in 65 nM and 80 nM colcemid-treated cells with some degree of fragmentation evident in 100-nM colcemid-treated cells. Each cell is representative of each condition imaged with SOFI (SI Fig. 5). Scale bars = 5 μm. b Overlay of 10 representative filament traces from SOFI time-lapses of control, 7-nM and 18-nM colcemid-treated cells. Representative SOFI time-lapse movies of each condition are shown in Additional file 2. c Length values were extracted between each consecutive frame and used to determine the given ∆length for each pair of frames. Distributions of ∆length values obtained from 3 independent assays, N = 12 cells, > 96 filaments and > 770 ∆length events for each condition. Scatter plots of data overlaid with median, interquartile range (IQR, box) and full range (whiskers). The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was used to determine the significant difference between control and 18 nM colcemid treatment (**p = 0.0011). Data for c are provided in Additional file 3: Sheet 3