Related papers: Five models for myosin V
The structural reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton is facilitated through the action of motor proteins that crosslink the actin filaments and transport them relative to each other. Here, we present a combined experimental-computational…
Here we generalize our previous model of molecular motors trafficking subdiffusing cargos in viscoelastic cytosol by (i) including mechanochemical coupling between cyclic conformational fluctuations of the motor protein driven by the…
A data fitting procedure is devised and thoroughly tested to provide self-consistent estimates of the relevant mechanokinetic parameters involved in a plausible scheme underpinning the output of an ensemble of myosin II molecular motors…
The dependence of the unfolding pathway of proteins on the pulling speed is investigated. This is done by introducing a simple one-dimensional chain comprising $N$ units, with different characteristic bistable free energies. These units…
Many biological processes are supported by special molecules, called motor proteins or molecular motors, that transport cellular cargoes along linear protein filaments and can reversibly associate to their tracks. Stimulated by these…
Cellular cargo can be bound to cytoskeletal filaments by one or multiple active or passive molecular motors. Recent experiments have shown that the presence of auxiliary, nondriving motors, results in an enhanced processivity of the cargo,…
New developments in the study of multi-meson systems are reviewed. We highlight a new recursive algorithm for generating the requisite contractions needed for studying complex systems of mesons involving large numbers of particles or…
We describe the results obtained from an improved model for protein folding. We find that a good agreement with the native structure of a 46 residue long, five-letter protein segment is obtained by carefully tuning the parameters of the…
Cytoplasmic dynein exhibits a directional processive movement on microtubule filaments and is known to move in steps of varying length based on the number of ATP molecules bound to it and the load that it carries. It is experimentally…
Structural Maintenance Complexes (SMC) are energy consuming motors that are important in folding the genome by loop extrusion (LE) in all stages of the cell cycle. Single molecule magnetic tweezer pulling experiments have revealed that…
Traffic-like collective movements are observed at almost all levels of biological systems. Molecular motor proteins like, for example, kinesin and dynein, which are the vehicles of almost all intra-cellular transport in eukayotic cells,…
Actin filaments, crosslinkers and myosin molecular motors form contractile networks. For instance, the cell cortex is a thin network below the cell membrane ; contraction of the cell cortex allows cells to round up during cell division.…
Contractile forces are essential for many developmental processes involving cell shape change and tissue deformation. Recent experiments on reconstituted actomyosin networks, the major component of the contractile machinery, have shown that…
Many types of molecular motors have been proposed and synthesized in recent years, displaying different kinds of motion, and fueled by different driving forces such as light, heat, or chemical reactions. We propose a new type of molecular…
Background: Hidden Markov models (HMM) are powerful machine learning tools successfully applied to problems of computational Molecular Biology. In a predictive task, the HMM is endowed with a decoding algorithm in order to assign the most…
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…
We consider the dynamics of a rigid filament in a motor protein assay under external loading. The motor proteins are modeled as active harmonic linkers with tail ends immobilized on a substrate. Their heads attach to the filament…
How proteins fold remains a central unsolved problem in biology. While the idea of a folding code embedded in the amino acid sequence was introduced more than 6 decades ago, this code remains undefined. While we now have powerful predictive…
Molecular motors perform active movements along cytoskeletal filaments and drive the traffic of organelles and other cargo particles in cells. In contrast to the macroscopic traffic of cars, however, the traffic of molecular motors is…
The effect of sequence heterogeneity on the dynamics of molecular motors is reviewed and analyzed using a set of recently introduced lattice models. First, we review results for the influence of heterogenous tracks such as a single-strand…