Data from: Mechanical fatigue in microtubules

Mechanical failure of biological nanostructures due to sustained force
application has been studied in great detail. In contrast, fatigue failure
arising from repeated application of subcritical stresses has received
little attention despite its prominent role in engineering and potentially
biology. Here, taxol-stabilized microtubules are up to 256 times bent into
sinusoidal shapes of varying wavelength and the frequency of breaking
events are observed. These experiments allow the calculation of fatigue
life parameters for microtubules. Repeated buckling due to 12.5%
compression – equal to the compression level experienced by microtubules
in contracting cardiomyocytes – results in failure after in average 5
million cycles, whereas at 20% compression failure occurs after in average
one thousand cycles. The fatigue strength (Basquin) exponent B is
estimated as -0.06.