Statistical mechanics of the Huxley-Simmons model
Abstract
The chemomechanical model of Huxley and Simmons (HS) [A. F. Huxley and R. M. Simmons, Nature 233, 533 (1971)] provides a paradigmatic description of mechanically induced collective conformational changes relevant in a variety of biological contexts, from muscles power-stroke and hair cell gating to integrin binding and hairpin unzipping. We develop a statistical mechanical perspective on the HS model by exploiting a formal analogy with a paramagnetic Ising model. We first study the equilibrium HS model with a finite number of elements and compute explicitly its mechanical and thermal properties. To model kinetics, we derive a master equation and solve it for several loading protocols. The developed formalism is applicable to a broad range of allosteric systems with mean-field interactions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1605.08314,
title = {Statistical mechanics of the Huxley-Simmons model},
author = {M Caruel and L Truskinovsky},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.08314},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
Physical Review E , American Physical Society (APS), 2016. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1510.03011