Related papers: Realistic Models of Biological Motion
In recent literature there has been a lot of interest in the phenomena of noise induced transport in the absence of an average bias occurring in spatially periodic systems far from equilibrium. One of the main motivations in this area is to…
Molecular motors are found throughout the cells of the human body, and have many different and important roles. These micro-machines move along filament tracks, and have the ability to convert chemical energy into mechanical work that…
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…
Recent experiments demonstrate that molecular motors from the Myosin II family serve as cross-links inducing active tension in the cytoskeletal network. Here we revise the Brownian ratchet model, previously studied in the context of active…
Living systems often exhibit internal driving: active, molecular processes drive nonequilibrium phenomena such as metabolism or migration. Active gels constitute a fascinating class of internally driven matter, where molecular motors exert…
The structural reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton is facilitated through the action of motor proteins that crosslink the actin filaments and transport them relative to each other. Here, we present a combined experimental-computational…
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…
Regulating physical size is an essential problem that biological organisms must solve from the subcellular to the organismal scales, but it is not well understood what physical principles and mechanisms organisms use to sense and regulate…
Motor enzymes are remarkable molecular machines that use the energy derived from the hydrolysis of a nucleoside triphosphate to generate mechanical movement, achieved through different steps that constitute their kinetic cycle. These…
We analyze a model for a walker moving on a ratchet potential. This model is motivated by the properties of transport of motor proteins, like kinesin and myosin. The walker consists of two feet represented as two particles coupled…
Conventional kinesin is a homodimeric motor protein that unidirectionally transports organelles along filamentous microtubule (MT) by hydrolyzing ATP molecules. This study shows that the load modulations of ATP turnover and head diffusion…
Contractile forces are essential for many developmental processes involving cell shape change and tissue deformation. Recent experiments on reconstituted actomyosin networks, the major component of the contractile machinery, have shown that…
Cytoskeletal filaments transported by surface immobilized molecular motors with one end pinned to the surface have been observed to spiral in a myosin-driven actin 'gliding assay'. The radius of the spiral was shown to scale with motor…
Myosin II molecular motors slide actin filaments relatively to each other and are essential for force generation, motility and mechanosensing in animal cells. For non-muscle cells, evolution has resulted in three different isoforms, which…
Active gels are a class of biologically-relevant material containing embedded agents that spontaneously generate forces acting on a sparse filament network. In vitro experiments of protein filaments and molecular motors have revealed a…
Cytoskeletal motors known as motor proteins are molecules that drive cellular transport along several parallel cytoskeletal filaments and support many biological processes. Experimental evidences suggest that they interact with the nearest…
Fueled by the hydrolysis of ATP, the motor protein kinesin literally walks on two legs along the biopolymer microtubule. The number of accidental backsteps that kinesin takes appears to be much larger than what one would expect given the…
We have developed a two dimensional stochastic molecular dynamics model for the description of intra cellular collective motion of bio motors, in particular Kinesins, on a microtubular track. The model is capable or reproducing the…
The mathematical formulation of the model for molecular movement of single motor proteins driven by cyclic biochemical reactions in an aqueous environment leads to a drifted Brownian motion characterized by coupled diffusion equations. In…
Biofilament-motor protein complexes are ubiquitous in biology and drive the transport of cargo vital for many fundamental cellular processes. As they move, motor proteins exert compressive forces on the filaments to which they are attached,…