We study the role of microtubule movement in bidirectional organelle
transport in Drosophila S2 cells and show that EGFP-tagged peroxisomes in cells
serve as sensitive probes of motor induced, noisy cytoskeletal motions.
Multiple peroxisomes move in unison over large time windows and show
correlations with microtubule tip positions, indicating rapid microtubule
fluctuations in the longitudinal direction. We report the first high-resolution
measurement of longitudinal microtubule fluctuations performed by tracing such
pairs of co-moving peroxisomes. The resulting picture shows that
motor-dependent longitudinal microtubule oscillations contribute significantly
to cargo movement along microtubules. Thus, contrary to the conventional view,
organelle transport cannot be described solely in terms of cargo movement along
stationary microtubule tracks, but instead includes a strong contribution from
the movement of the tracks.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure