Fig. 8. MT life cycle and steady state length distribution (A). Life history of a typical MT reconstructed from data from two individual MTs. The first part (up to time axis break) traces persistent growth towards the cell boundary followed by catastrophes induced by the boundary that are rescued at high frequency. The second part (after time axis break) shows the rare event of shortening back to the centrosome. (B) Diagram of radial array of MTs showing distribution of lengths in accordance with exponential function fitted to data from subtraction analysis. Long MTs dominate over short ones.