Related papers: Modelling cargo transport in crowded environments:…
Intracellular transport of vesicular cargos, organelles, and other macromolecules is an essential process to move large items through a crowded, and inhomogeneous cellular environment. In an effort to dissect the fundamental effects of…
Most models designed to study the bidirectional movement of cargos as they are driven by molecular motors rely on the idea that motors of different polarities can be coordinated by external agents if arranged into a motor-cargo complex to…
The origins of the large differences observed to the rates with which the diverse particles are conveyed along axonal microtubules are still a matter of debate in the literature. There is evidence that certain neurodegenerative diseases may…
In cells and in vitro assays the number of motor proteins involved in biological transport processes is far from being unlimited. The cytoskeletal binding sites are in contact with the same finite reservoir of motors (either the cytosol or…
Inside cells, cargos such as vesicles and organelles are transported by molecular motors to their correct locations via active motion on cytoskeletal tracks and passive, Brownian diffusion. During the transportation of cargos, motor-cargo…
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,…
Many different types of cellular cargos are transported bidirectionally along microtubules by teams of molecular motors. The motion of this cargo-motors system has been experimentally characterized in vivo as processive with rather…
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…
We analyze theoretically the effects of excluded-volume interactions between motors on the dynamics of a cargo driven by multiple motors. The model considered shares many commons with other recently proposed in the literature, with the…
Biomolecular motors use free energy to drive a variety of cellular tasks, including the transport of cargo, such as vesicles and organelles. We find that the widely-used `constant-force' approximation for the effect of cargo on motor…
Motor-driven cargo transport is a complex phenomenon where multiple motor proteins attached on to a cargo engage in pulling activity, often leading to tug-of-war, displaying bidirectional motion. However, most mathematical and computational…
Within living cells, the transport of cargo is accomplished by groups of molecular motors. Such collective transport could utilize mechanisms which emerge from inter-motor interactions in ways that are yet to be fully understood. Here we…
Motor-driven intracellular transport of organelles, vesicles, and other molecular cargo is a highly collective process. An individual cargo is often pulled by a team of transport motors, with numbers ranging from only a few to several…
Routinely navigating through an ever-changing and unsteady environment, and utilizing chemical energy, molecular motors transport the cell's crucial components, such as neurotransmitters and organelles. They generate force and pull cargo,…
Inside cells, various cargos are transported by teams of molecular motors. Intriguingly, the motors involved generally have opposite pulling directions, and the resulting cargo dynamics is a biased stochastic motion. It is an open question…
Microtubule-based molecular motors often work in small groups to transport cargos in cells. A key question in understanding transport (and its regulation in vivo) is to identify the sensitivity of multiple-motor-based motion to various…
We analyze theoretically the problem of cargo transport along microtubules by motors of two species with opposite polarities. We consider two different one-dimensional models previously developed in the literature. On the one hand, a quite…
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 discuss a theoretical model for bidirectional cargo transport in biological cells, which is driven by teams of molecular motors and subject to thermal fluctuations. The model describes explicitly the directed motion of the molecular…
Biological transport is supported by collective dynamics of enzymatic molecules that are called motor proteins or molecular motors. Experiments suggest that motor proteins interact locally via short-range potentials. We investigate the…