Traffic of Molecular Motors

Stefan Klumpp, Melanie J. I. Müller and Reinhard Lipowsky
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Stefan Klumpp: Max-Planck-Institut für Kolloid- und Grenzflächenforschung
Melanie J. I. Müller: Max-Planck-Institut für Kolloid- und Grenzflächenforschung
Reinhard Lipowsky: Max-Planck-Institut für Kolloid- und Grenzflächenforschung

A chapter in Traffic and Granular Flow’05, 2007, pp 251-261 from Springer

Abstract: Summary 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 characterized by a finite walking distance (or run length) after which a motor unbinds from the filament along which it moves. Unbound motors perform Brownian motion in the surrounding aqueous solution until they rebind to a filament. We use variants of driven lattice gas models to describe the interplay of their active movements, the unbound diffusion, and the binding/unbinding dynamics. If the motor concentration is large, motor-motor interactions become important and lead to a variety of cooperative traffic phenomena such as traffic jams on the filaments, boundary-induced phase transitions, and spontaneous symmetry breaking in systems with two species of motors. If the filament is surrounded by a large reservoir of motors, the jam length, i.e., the extension of the traffic jams, is of the order of the walking distance. Much longer jams can be found in confined geometries such as tube-like compartments.

Keywords: Active Movement; Walking Distance; Molecular Motor; Mutual Exclusion; Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-47641-2_20

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-47641-2_20

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