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Allosteric regulation is often viewed as thermodynamic in nature. However protein internal motions during an enzymatic reaction cycle can be slow hopping processes over numerous potential barriers. We propose that regulating molecules may…
The dynamics of folding of proteins is studied by means of a phenomenological master equation. The energy distribution is taken as a truncated exponential for the misfolded states plus a native state sitting below the continuum. The…
Replication and transcription are two important processes in living systems. To execute such processes, various proteins work far away from equilibrium in a staggered way. Motivated by this, aspects of hysteresis during unzipping of DNA…
The transport of cargo particles which are pulled by several molecular motors in a cooperative manner is studied theoretically. The transport properties depend primarily on the maximal number, $N$, of motor molecules that may pull…
Molecular motors drive mechanical motions utilizing the free energy liberated from chemical reactions such as ATP hydrolysis. Although it is essential to know the efficiency of this free energy transduction, it has been a challenge due to…
Recent experimental studies strongly suggest the influence of glial purinergic transmission in the modulation of synaptic dynamics. By releasing adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which accumulates as adenosine, astrocytes tonically suppressed…
Living cells move thanks to assemblies of actin filaments and myosin motors that range from very organized striated muscle tissue to disordered intracellular bundles. The mechanisms powering these disordered structures are debated, and all…
Synthesis of biopolymers such as DNA, RNA, and proteins are biophysical processes aided by enzymes. Performance of these enzymes is usually characterized in terms of their average error rate and speed. However, because of thermal…
FoF1-ATP synthase is the enzyme that provides the 'chemical energy currency' adenosine triphosphate, ATP, for living cells. The formation of ATP is accomplished by a stepwise internal rotation of subunits within the enzyme. Briefly, proton…
Step pattern stability of the vicinal surfaces during growth was analyzed using various surface kinetic models. It was shown that standard analysis of the vicinal surfaces provides no indication on the possible step coalescence and…
The actin cytoskeleton is an active semi-flexible polymer network whose non-equilibrium properties coordinate both stable and contractile behaviors to maintain or change cell shape. While myosin motors drive the actin cytoskeleton…
Inspired by the need for effective stochastic models to describe the complex behavior of biological motor proteins that move on linear tracks exact results are derived for the velocity and dispersion of simple linear sequential models (or…
Protein translation is a multistep process which can be represented as a cascade of biochemical reactions (initiation, ribosome assembly, elongation, etc.), the rate of which can be regulated by small non-coding microRNAs through multiple…
The progress of the successive rounds of catalytic conversion of substrates into product(s) by a single enzyme is characterized by the distribution of turnover times. Establishing the most general form of dependence of this distribution on…
Molecular motors of the kinesin-1 family move in a directed and processive fashion along microtubules (MTs). It is generally accepted that steric hindrance of motors leads to crowding effects; however, little is known about the specific…
Cells control the size and organization of biomolecular condensates formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), but multiple mechanisms likely contribute to this control and remain to be fully elucidated. Here we propose a…
Mechanochemical coupling was studied for two different types of myosin motors in cells: myosin V, which carries cargo over long distances by as a single molecule; and myosin II, which generates a contracting force in cooperation with other…
We propose a novel mechanism of cell motility, which relies on the coupling of actin polymerization at the cell membrane to geometric confinement. We consider a polymerizing viscoelastic cytoskeletal gel confined in a narrow channel, and…
F1F0 ATP synthase (ATPase) either facilitates the synthesis of ATP in the mitochondrial membranes and bacterial inner membranes in a process driven by the proton moving force (pmf), or uses the energy from ATP hydrolysis to pump protons…
The utilization of glycolysis in aerobic conditions have been a subject of debate for more than a century. A hypothesis supported by previous data is that glycolysis has a higher rate of ATP production per protein mass and per occupied…