Related papers: Enhancement of cargo processivity by cooperating m…
Molecular motors are involved in key transport processes inside actin-based cellular protrusions. The motors carry cargo proteins to the protrusion tip which participate in regulating the actin polymerization, and play a key role in…
With their longest dimension typically being less than 100 nm, molecular motors are significantly below the optical-resolution limit. Despite substantial advances in fluorescence-based imaging methodologies, labeling with beads remains…
We introduce a stochastic lattice gas model including two particle species and two parallel lanes. One lane with exclusion interaction and directed motion and the other lane without exclusion and unbiased diffusion, mimicking a micotubule…
An aster of microtubules is a set of flexible polar filaments with dynamic plus-ends, which irradiate from a common location at which the minus ends of the filaments are found. Processive soluble oligomeric motor complexes can bind…
We computationally investigate the active transport of tangentially-driven polymers with varying degrees of flexibility and activity in two-dimensional square lattices of obstacles. Tight periodic confinement induces notable conformational…
The ability of many living systems to actively self-propel underlies critical biomedical, environmental, and industrial processes. While such active transport is well-studied in uniform settings, environmental complexities such as geometric…
The cytoskeleton is an active composite of filamentous proteins that dictates diverse mechanical properties and processes in eukaryotic cells by generating forces and autonomously restructuring itself. Enzymatic motors that act on the…
In this paper, we develop and analyze a minimal model for a 2D network of cross-linked actin filaments and myosin motors, representing the cortical cytoskeleton of eukaryotic cells. We implement coarse-grained representations of force…
Long-distance bidirectional transport of organelles depends on the motor proteins kinesin and dynein. Using quantitative data obtained from a fungal model system, we previously developed ASEP-models of bidirectional motion of motors along…
The motor part of a crawling eukaryotic cell can be represented schematically as an active continuum layer. The main active processes in this layer are protrusion, originating from non-equilibrium polymerization of actin fibers,…
Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…
Myosin motor proteins drive vigorous steady-state fluctuations in the actin cytoskeleton of cells. Endogenous embedded semiflexible filaments such as microtubules, or added filaments such as single-walled carbon nanotubes are used as novel…
Myosin-V is a motor protein responsible for organelle and vesicle transport in cells. Recent single-molecule experiments have shown that it is an efficient processive motor that walks along actin filaments taking steps of mean size close to…
Most cells possess the capacity to locomote. Alone or collectively, this allows them to adapt, to rearrange, and to explore their surroundings. The biophysical characterization of such motile processes, in health and disease, has so far…
We consider a model of an extensible semiflexible filament moving in two dimensions on a motility assay of motor proteins represented explicitly as active harmonic linkers. Their heads bind stochastically to polymer segments within a…
We investigate a driven two-channel system where particles on different lanes mutually obstruct each others motion extending an earlier model by Popkov and Peschel [1]. This obstruction may occur in biological contexts due to steric…
Molecular signalling in living cells occurs at low copy numbers and is thereby inherently limited by the noise imposed by thermal diffusion. The precision at which biochemical receptors can count signalling molecules is intimately related…
We extend a model for the morphology and dynamics of a crawling eukaryotic cell to describe cells on micropatterned substrates. This model couples cell morphology, adhesion, and cytoskeletal flow in response to active stresses induced by…
Molecular motors walk along filaments until they detach stochastically with a force-dependent unbinding rate. Here, we show that this unbinding rate can be obtained from the analysis of experimental data of molecular motors moving in…
Intracellular transport is essential for maintaining proper cellular function in most eukaryotic cells, with perturbations in active transport resulting in several types of disease. Efficient delivery of critical cargos to specific…