Related papers: Dynamics of an inchworm nano-walker
We present a generic coarse-grained model to describe molecular motors acting on polymer substrates, mimicking, for example, RNA polymerase on DNA or kinesin on microtubules. The polymer is modeled as a connected chain of beads; motors are…
We introduce a model for translational molecular motors to demonstrate that a multivalent catalytic walker with flexible, uncoordinated legs can transform the free energy of surface-bound substrate sites into mechanical work and undergo…
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…
Transport of molecular motors along protein filaments in a half-closed geometry is a common feature of biologically relevant processes in cellular protrusions. Using a lattice gas model we study how the interplay between active and…
One common feature of a vehicle, an ant and a kinesin motor is that they all convert chemical energy, derived from fuel or food, into mechanical energy required for their forward movement; such objects have been modelled in recent years as…
Anomalously slow passive diffusion, $\langle \delta x^2(t)\rangle\simeq t^{\alpha}$, with $0<\alpha<1$, of larger tracers such as messenger RNA and endogenous submicron granules in the cytoplasm of living biological cells has been…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Molecular motor proteins such as Myosin V, Dynein or Kinesin are no ratchets, at least not with a flashing asymmetric potential; the crucial asymmetry is in the dynamical activity. We make that explicit in terms of a simple Markov model,…
Biological molecular motors are high-performance nanomachines that convert chemical energy into mechanical motion via chemomechanical coupling. Their reaction cycles typically comprise a series of intermediate chemical states between the…
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 study the motion of dispersed nanoprobes in entangled active-passive polymer mixtures. By comparing the two architectures of linear vs. unconcatenated and unknotted circular polymers, we demonstrate that novel, rich physics emerge. For…
We discover a new type of nonequilibrium phase transition in a model of chromatin dynamics, which accounts for the coherent motions that have been observed in experiment. The coherent motion is due to the long-range cooperation of molecular…
Inspired by biology, great progress has been made in creating artificial molecular motors. However, the dream of harnessing proteins - the building blocks selected by Nature - to design autonomous motors has so far remained elusive. Here we…
We study the mechanical and thermodynamic properties of different traffic models for kinesin which are relevant in biological and experimental contexts. We find that motor-motor interactions play a fundamental role by enhancing the…
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…
We have proposed the neck linker swing model to investigate the mechanism of mechanochemical coupling of kinesin. The Michaelis-Menten-like curve for velocity vs ATP concentration at different loads has been obtained, which is in agreement…
Molecular motors interacting with cytoskeletal filaments undergo peculiar random walks consisting of alternating sequences of directed movements along the filaments and diffusive motion in the surrounding solution. An ensemble of motors is…
Cytoplasmic dyneins transport cellular organelles by moving on a microtubule filament. It has been found recently that depending on the applied force and the concentration of the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) molecules, dynein's step size…
We study the ensemble velocity of non-processive motor proteins, described with multiple chemical states. In particular, we discuss the velocity as a function of ATP concentration. Even a simple model which neglects the strain-dependence of…
Analytical formulas for effective drift, diffusivity, run times, and run lengths are derived for an intracellular transport system consisting of a cargo attached to two cooperative but not identical molecular motors (for example, kinesin-1…