Related papers: Hitchhiking Through the Cytoplasm
It is well established that a wide variety of phenomena in cellular and molecular biology involve anomalous transport e.g. the statistics for the motility of cells and molecules are fractional and do not conform to the archetypes of simple…
Here we generalize our previous model of molecular motors trafficking subdiffusing cargos in viscoelastic cytosol by (i) including mechanochemical coupling between cyclic conformational fluctuations of the motor protein driven by the…
A variety of complex mechanisms, from chemical reaction pathways to active fluctuations, orchestrate molecular transport in intracellular environments. Despite significant recent progress in visualizing and probing these processes, little…
Cells move differently on substrates with different elasticities. In particular, the persistence time of their motion is higher on stiffer substrates. We show that this behavior will result in a net transport of cells directed up a…
The collective behavior of molecular motor proteins have been investigated in the literature using models to describe the long-time dynamics of a unidimensional continuum motor distribution. Here, we consider the phenomena related to the…
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…
Many transport processes in nature take place on substrates, often considered as unidimensional lanes. These unidimensional substrates are typically non-static: affected by a fluctuating environment, they can undergo conformational changes.…
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…
We introduce a multi-species lattice gas model for motor protein driven collective cargo transport on cellular filaments. We use this model to describe and analyze the collective motion of interacting vesicle cargoes being carried by…
Cytoplasmic dynein exhibits a directional processive movement on microtubule filaments and is known to move in steps of varying length based on the number of ATP molecules bound to it and the load that it carries. It is experimentally…
The mechanics of cells is strongly affected by molecular motors that generate forces in the cellular cytoskeleton. We develop a model for cytoskeletal networks driven out of equilibrium by molecular motors exerting transient contractile…
Biological activity gives rise to non-equilibrium fluctuations in the cytoplasm of cells; however, there are few methods to directly measure these fluctuations. Using a reconstituted actin cytoskeleton, we show that the bending dynamics of…
A living cell's interior is one of the most complex and intrinsically dynamic systems, providing an elaborate interplay between cytosolic crowding and ATP-driven motion, which controls cellular functionality. Here, we investigated two…
Cells are complex structures which require considerable amounts of organization via transport of large intracellular cargo. While passive diffusion is often sufficiently fast for the transport of smaller cargo, active transport is necessary…
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,…
Motivated by experimental results on the interplay between molecular motors and tau proteins, we extend lattice-based models of intracellular transport to include a second species of particle which locally influences the motor-filament…
Cytoskeletal crowding plays a key role in the diffusion of DNA molecules through the cell, acting as a barrier to effective intracellular transport and conformational stability required for such processes as transfection, viral infection,…
We investigate the transport dynamics of elongated particles in cellular vortical flows that undergo spatial oscillations over time. Experimental flow visualizations reveal mixed flow fields with chaotic and elliptic regions coexisting.…
We propose a novel mechanism of cell motility, which relies on the coupling of actin polymerization at the cell membrane to geometric confinement. We consider a polymerizing viscoelastic cytoskeletal gel confined in a narrow channel, and…
Compartmentalization into biochemically distinct organelles constantly exchanging material is one of the hallmarks of eukaryotic cells. In the most naive picture of inter-organelle transport driven by concentration gradients, concentration…