Actin filaments growing against a barrier with fluctuating shape
Abstract
We study force generation by a set of parallel actin filaments growing against a non-rigid obstacle, in presence of an external load. The filaments polymerize by either moving the whole obstacle, with a large energy cost, or by causing local distortion in its shape which costs much less energy. The non-rigid obstacle also has local thermal fluctuations due to which its shape can change with time and we describe this using fluctuations in the height profile of a one dimensional interface with Kardar-Parisi-Zhang dynamics. We find the shape fluctuations of the barrier strongly affects the force generation mechanism. The qualitative nature of the force-velocity curve is crucially determined by the relative time-scale of filament and barrier dynamics. The height profile of the barrier also shows interesting variation with the external load. Our analytical calculation within mean-field theory shows reasonable agreement with our simulation results.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1606.07553,
title = {Actin filaments growing against a barrier with fluctuating shape},
author = {Raj Kumar Sadhu and Sakuntala Chatterjee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.07553},
year = {2016}
}