ABSTRACT
The purpose of the study was to detect the rates of hyphal tip growth and nuclei position of N. crassa in influence of drug medium, Taxol. The results of the experiments show that the rate of hyphal tip growth and nuclei position are much lower in drug medium than in the control. Taxol have different effect on growth of tip and distance travelled by nuclei. Moreover, the rate at which the nuclei displace and growth of the tips are dependent on the medium and not on each other. Thus, the results conclude that drug effected fungus affects the tip growth rate and nuclei displacement. INTRODUCTION The purpose of the experiment is to study the hyphal tip growth, and to observe the effects of a drug on the tip growth and the nuclei position of a fungal hyphae. The fungus used in the study is Neurospora crassa, a common red bread mold of Europe and America and was originally obtained from sugar-cane bagasse near New Orleans (Shear and Dodge 1927). It is a common model organism in biology, genetics, cell biology labs, and in research. Because it is quickly reproducing, is easy to culture and can survive on minimal media. Moreover, microtubules and actin are cytoskeletal filaments responsible for structural support for fungus tip, and help in replication of the cell. Actin filament helps tip to grow by polymerizing, so actin subunit comes together form branch-like structure at the tip is called hyphae (Rosenblum and Shivers 2000). The drug was used in this experiment was Taxol, an anticancer drug extracted from the Taxus brevifolia; type of plant which came from family of pacific yew tree (Schiff and Horwitz 1980). Taxol is a drug that inhibits actin filaments to form, it depolymerizes the actin filament, so actin subunit don’t bind together, so actin filament formation block and inhibit the growth of the tip. Taxol also inhibit microtubule depolymerization