Related papers: Model for the unidirectional motion of a dynein mo…
A common type of cytoskeletal morphology involves multiple converging microbutubules with their minus ends collected and stabilized by a microtubule organizing center (MTOC) in the interior of the cell. This arrangement enables the…
Cell spreading is investigated at various scales in order to understand motility of living cells which is essential for a range of physiological activities in higher organisms as well as in microbes. At a microscopic scale, it has been seen…
Large scale motion of cytoplasm called cytoplasmic streaming occurs in some large eukaryotic cells to stir the cell's constituents. In Drosophila oocytes, microtubules have been observed to undergo undulating motion, curving to form…
The transport of macromolecules, such as DNA, through the cytoskeleton is critical to wide-ranging cellular processes from cytoplasmic streaming to transcription. The rigidity and steric hindrances imparted by the network of filaments…
Aggregation and fragmentation of single molecules in the cell environment lead to a spectrum of diffusivities and to statistical laws of movement very different from typical Brownian motion. Current models of intracellular transport do not…
A theoretical calculation is presented to describe the confined motion of transmembrane molecules in cell membranes. The study is analytic, based on Master equations for the probability of the molecules moving as random walkers, and leads…
Many cell functions are accomplished thanks to intracellular transport mechanisms of macromolecules along filaments. Molecular motors such as dynein or kinesin are proteins playing a primary role in these processes. The behavior of such…
Intracellular transport of DNA carriers is a fundamental step of gene delivery. We present here a theoretical approach to study generically a single virus or DNA particle trafficking in a cell cytoplasm. Cellular trafficking has been…
Many cellular processes rely on the cell's ability to transport material to and from the nucleus. Networks consisting of many microtubules and actin filaments are key to this transport. Recently, the inhibition of intracellular transport…
Cytoskeletal filaments transported by surface immobilized molecular motors with one end pinned to the surface have been observed to spiral in a myosin-driven actin 'gliding assay'. The radius of the spiral was shown to scale with motor…
Intracellular transport is based on molecular motors that pull cargos along cytoskeletal filaments. One motor species always moves in one direction, e.g. conventional kinesin moves to the microtubule plus end, while cytoplasmic dynein moves…
The cytoskeleton -- a composite network of biopolymers, molecular motors, and associated binding proteins -- is a paradigmatic example of active matter. Particle transport through the cytoskeleton can range from anomalous and heterogeneous…
Diffusion of tracer particles in the cytoplasm of mammalian cells is often anomalous with a marked heterogeneity even within individual particle trajectories. Despite considerable efforts, the mechanisms behind these observations have…
Optical tracking in vivo experiments reveal that diffusion of particles in biological cells is strongly enhanced in the presence of ATP and the experimental data for animal cells could previously be reproduced within a phenomenological…
Pigment organelles known as melanosomes disperse or aggregate in a melanophore in response to hormones. These movements are mediated by the microtubule motors kinesin-2 and cytoplasmic dynein. However, the force generation mechanism of…
Motivated by the sidewise motions of dynein motors shown in experiments, we use a variant of the exclusion process to model the multistep dynamics of dyneins on a cylinder with open ends. Due to the varied step sizes of the particles in a…
Intermediate filaments form an essential structural network, spread throughout the cytoplasm and play a key role in cell mechanics, intracellular organization and molecular signaling. The maintenance of the network and its adaptation to the…
Kinesin motors have been studied extensively both experimentally and theoretically. However, the microscopic mechanism of the processive movement of kinesin is still an open question. In this paper, we propose a hand-over-hand model for the…
Motor proteins display widely different stepping patterns as they move on microtubule tracks, from the deterministic linear or helical motion performed by the protein kinesin to the uncoordinated random steps made by dynein. How these…
In cells, most of cargos are transported by motor proteins along microtubule. Biophysically, unidirectional motion of large number of motor proteins along a single track can be described by totally asymmetric simple exclusion process…