Related papers: Understanding Mechanochemical Coupling in Kinesins…
Kinesin is a molecular motor that transports cargo along microtubules. The results of many {\it in vitro} experiments on kinesin-1 are described by kinetic models \cite{Clancy11} in which one transition corresponds to the forward motion and…
Mechanochemical coupling was studied for two different types of myosin motors in cells: myosin V, which carries cargo over long distances by as a single molecule; and myosin II, which generates a contracting force in cooperation with other…
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…
Synthesis of protein molecules in a cell are carried out by ribosomes. A ribosome can be regarded as a molecular motor which utilizes the input chemical energy to move on a messenger RNA (mRNA) track that also serves as a template for the…
Microtubules are filamentous tubular protein polymers which are essential for a range of cellular behaviour, and are generally straight over micron length scales. However, in some gliding assays, where microtubules move over a carpet of…
Conventional kinesin is a homodimeric motor protein that is capable of walking unidirectionally along a cytoskeletal filament. While previous experiments indicated unyielding unidirectionality against an opposing load up to the so-called…
Myosin-V is a highly processive dimeric protein that walks with 36nm steps along actin tracks, powered by coordinated ATP hydrolysis reactions in the two myosin heads. No previous theoretical models of the myosin-V walk reproduce all the…
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…
Mixtures of microtubules and molecular motors form active materials with diverse dynamical behaviors that vary based on their constituents' molecular properties. We map the non-equilibrium phase diagram of microtubules and tip-accumulating…
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…
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…
Molecular motors of the kinesin-1 family move in a directed and processive fashion along microtubules (MTs). It is generally accepted that steric hindrance of motors leads to crowding effects; however, little is known about the specific…
The statistics of steps and dwell times in reversible molecular motors differ from those of cycle completion in enzyme kinetics. The reason is that a step is only one of several transitions in the mechanochemical cycle. As a result,…
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,…
Two simple (rotator and one-particle) mechanistic models are suggested to describe simultaneously at a minimal level of sophistication two basic functions of F$_1$-ATPase: a motor regime driven by ATP hydrolysis and its inverted function as…
F1-ATPase catalyses ATP hydrolysis and converts the cellular chemical energy into mechanical rotation. The hydrolysis reaction in F1-ATPase does not follow the widely believed Michaelis-Menten mechanism. Instead, the hydrolysis mechanism…
We study the effect of a coupling between two motor domains in highly-processive motor protein complexes. A simple stochastic discrete model, in which the two parts of the protein molecule interact through some energy potential, is…
The dynamics of motor protein molecules that have two subunits is investigated using simple discrete stochastic models. Exact steady-state analytical expressions are obtained for velocities and dispersions for any number of intermediate…
The cytoskeleton relies on diverse populations of motors, filaments, and binding proteins acting in concert to enable non-equilibrium processes ranging from mitosis to chemotaxis. Its versatile reconfigurability, programmed by interactions…
We propose a two-dimensional model for a complete description of the dynamics of molecular motors, including both the processive movement along track filaments and the dissociation from the filaments. The theoretical results on the…