Related papers: Hitchhiking Through the Cytoplasm
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,…
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…
A novel mechanism for the transport of microscale particles in viscous fluids is demonstrated. The mechanism exploits the trapping of such particles by rotational streaming cells established in the vicinity of an oscillating cylinder,…
Transport of molecules across membrane channels is investigated theoretically using exactly solvable discrete stochastic site-binding models. It is shown that the interaction potential between molecules and the channel has a strong effect…
Diffusion of tracer particles in the cytoplasm of mammalian cells is often anomalous with a marked heterogeneity even within individual particle trajectories. Despite considerable efforts, the mechanisms behind these observations have…
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…
Water molecules, confined in a carbon nanotube, were monitored using molecular dynamics simulation. Spontaneous directional transportation during a long timescale was observed in the symmetrical nanochannel by a ratchet-like mechanism. This…
Within cells, vesicles and proteins are actively transported several micrometers along the cytoskeletal filaments. The transport along microtubules is propelled by dynein and kinesin motors, which carry the cargo in opposite directions.…
We focus on potential mechanisms for `energy-loss-free' transport along the cell microtubules, which could be considered as realizations of Fr\"ohlich's ideas on the role of solitons for superconductivity and/or biological matter. In…
The cargo motion in living cells transported by two species of motor protein with different intrinsic directionality is discussed in this study. Similar to single motor movement, cargo steps forward and backward along microtubule…
The cytoskeleton in eukaryotic cells plays several crucial roles. In terms of intracellular transport, motor proteins use the cytoskeletal filaments as a backbone along which they can actively transport biological cargos such as vesicles…
Recent experiments reveal both passive subdiffusion of various nanoparticles and anomalous active transport of such particles by molecular motors in the molecularly crowded environment of living biological cells. Passive and active…
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 hopping model for cargo transport by molecular motors introduced in Refs. goldman1, goldman2, is extended here in order to incorporate the movement of cargo-motor complexes. In this context, hopping process expresses the possibility for…
Internet, social media, neuronal or blood vessel are organized in complex networks. These networks are characterized by several quantities such as the underlying graph connectivity (topology), how they grow in time, scaling laws or by the…
Transport across heterogeneous, patchy environments is a ubiquitous phenomenon spanning fields of study including ecological movement, intracellular transport and regions of specialised function in a cell. These regions or patches may be…
Many physiological phenomena involve directional cell migration. It is usually attributed to chemical gradients in vivo. Recently, other cues have been shown to guide cells in vitro, including stiffness/adhesion gradients or micro-patterned…
The cell cytoskeleton is a striking example of "active" medium driven out-of-equilibrium by ATP hydrolysis. Such activity has been shown recently to have a spectacular impact on the mechanical and rheological properties of the cellular…
We demonstrate the phenomenon of cumulative inertia in intracellular transport involving multiple motor proteins in human epithelial cells by measuring the empirical survival probability of cargoes on the microtubule and their detachment…
Intracellular components explore the cytoplasm via active motor-driven transport in conjunction with passive diffusion. We model the motion of organelles in narrow tubular cells using analytical techniques and numerical simulations to study…