Xenopus Oocyte Wound Healing as a Model System for Analysis of Microtubule-Actin Interactions

Microtubule-actin interactions are fundamental to many cellular processes such as cytokinesis and cellular locomotion. Investigating the mechanism of microtubule-actin interactions is the key to understand the cellular morphogenesis and related pathological processes. The abundance and highly dynamic nature of microtubules and F-actin raise a serious challenge when trying to distinguish between the real and fortuitous interactions within a cell. Xenopus oocyte wound model represents an ideal system to study microtubule-actin interactions as well as microtubule-dependent control of the actin polymerization. Here, we describe a series of cytoskeleton specific treatments in Xenopus oocyte wound healing experiments and use confocal fluorescence microscopy to analyze fixed oocytes to examine microtubule-actin interactions.