The Impact of Rate Formulations on Stochastic Molecular Motor Dynamics

Blackwell, R.; Jung, D.; Bukenberger, M.; Smith, Ana Sunčana (2019) The Impact of Rate Formulations on Stochastic Molecular Motor Dynamics. Scientific Reports, 9 (1). pp. 11491-11502. ISSN 2045-2322

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Official URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-54344-2

Abstract

Cells are complex structures which require considerable amounts of organization via transport of large intracellular cargo. While passive diffusion is often sufficiently fast for the transport of smaller cargo, active transport is necessary to organize large structures on the short timescales necessary for biological function. The main mechanism of this transport is by cargo attachment to motors which walk in a directed fashion along intracellular filaments. There are a number of models which seek to describe the motion of motors with attached cargo, from detailed microscopic to coarse phenomenological descriptions. We focus on the intermediate-detailed discrete stochastic hopping models, and explore how cargo transport changes depending on the number of motors, motor interaction, system constraints and rate formulations, which are derived from common thermodynamic assumptions. We find that, despite obeying the same detailed balance constraint, the choice of rate formulation considerably affects the characteristics of the overall motion of the system, with one rate formulation exhibiting novel behavior of loaded motor groups moving faster than a single unloaded motor.

Item Type:

Article

Additional Information:

A.-.S.S. and R.B. thank the ERC grant MembranesAct StG 337283 and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the postdoctoral fellowship provided for R.B. Special thanks to Udo Seifert for useful discussions and Daniel Schmidt for an early oversight for the project.

Uncontrolled Keywords:

Stochastic Molecular; Motor Dynamics

Subjects:

NATURAL SCIENCES > Physics

Divisions:

Division of Physical Chemistry

Projects: