Related papers: Crowding of molecular motors determines microtubul…
Intracellular transport along microtubules or actin filaments, powered by molecular motors such as kinesins, dyneins or myosins, has been recently modeled using one-dimensional driven lattice gases. We discuss some generalizations of these…
We investigate the cooperative dynamics of an ensemble of N microtubules growing against an elastic barrier. Microtubules undergo so-called catastrophes, which are abrupt stochastic transitions from a growing to a shrinking state, and…
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,…
Macromolecular crowding plays a crucial role in modulating protein dynamics in cellular and in vitro environments. Polymeric crowders such as dextran and Ficoll are known to induce entropic forces, including depletion interactions, that…
We study the dynamics of a tunable 2D active nematic liquid crystal composed of microtubules and kinesin motors confined to an oil-water interface. Kinesin motors continuously inject mechanical energy into the system through ATP hydrolysis,…
We analyse the dynamics of overlapping antiparallel treadmilling microtubules in the presence of crosslinking processive motor proteins that counterbalance an external force. We show that coupling the force-dependent velocity of motors and…
The traffic of molecular motors which interact through mutual exclusion is studied theoretically for half-open tube-like compartments. These half-open tubes mimic the shapes of axons. The mutual exclusion leads to traffic jams or density…
Gradient-driven diffusion in crowded, multicomponent mixtures is a topic of high interest because of its role in biological processes such as transport in cell membranes. In partially phase-separated solutions, gradient-driven diffusion…
Molecular motors are macromolecular complexes which use some form of input energy to perform mechanical work. The filamentary tracks, on which these motors move, are made of either proteins (e.g., microtubules) or nucleic acids (DNA or…
We review the effects of macromolecular crowding on the folding of RNA by considering the simplest scenario when excluded volume interactions between crowding particles and RNA dominate. Using human telomerase enzyme as an example, we…
Microtubules and motor proteins self organize into biologically important assemblies including the mitotic spindle and the centrosomal microtubule array. Outside of cells, microtubule-motor mixtures can form novel active liquid-crystalline…
We present a model for the spontaneous formation of a striated pattern in polymerizing microtubule solutions. It describes the buckling of a single microtubule (MT) bundle within an elastic network formed by other similarly aligned and…
The traffic of molecular motors through open tube-like compartments is studied using lattice models. These models exhibit boundary-induced phase transitions related to those of the asymmetric simple exclusion process (ASEP) in one…
Macromolecular crowding affects biophysical processes as diverse as diffusion, gene expression, cell growth, and senescence. Yet, there is no comprehensive understanding of how crowding affects reactions, particularly multivalent binding.…
Single kinesin molecular motors can processively move along a microtubule (MT) a few micrometers on average before dissociating. However, cellular length scales over which transport occurs are several hundred microns and more. Why seemingly…
The volume occupied by the unconstrained genomic DNA of prokaryotes in saline solutions is thousand times larger than the cell. Moreover, it is not separated from the rest of the cell by a membrane. Nevertheless, it occupies only a small…
Biomolecular condensates are essential for cellular organization and result from phase separation in systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Among various models, chemically active droplets play a significant role, consisting of…
Increasing the crowding in an environment does not necessarily trigger negative differential mobility of strongly pushed particles. Moreover, the choice of the model, in particular the kind of microscopic jump rates, may be very relevant in…
The flow of motor proteins on a filamental track is modelled within the the framework of lattice driven diffusive systems. Motors, considered as hopping particles, perform a highly biased asymmetric exclusion process when bound to the…
In microtubule-based active nematics, motor-driven extensile motion of microtubule bundles powers chaotic large-scale dynamics. We quantify the interfilament sliding motion both in isolated bundles and in a dense active nematic. The…