Detachment of molecular motors under tangential loading
Statistical Mechanics
2009-11-07 v1 Biological Physics
Abstract
We introduce a general framework to study the processivity of molecular motors moving along a polar filament and discuss the average time spent attached to the filament as a function of a tangentially applied load. Our study of specific models suggests that the attachment time of a motor decreases with increasing ATP concentration and that double-headed motors such as kinesins lose their processivity under forcing conditions while processive single-headed motors are less sensitive to tangential forcing.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0109187,
title = {Detachment of molecular motors under tangential loading},
author = {A. Parmeggiani and F. Julicher and L. Peliti and J. Prost},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0109187},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
7 pages, 5 figures. To be published on Europhysics Letters