Dresden 2009 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 15: Motor Proteins

BP 15.5: Talk

Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 15:30–15:45, ZEU 260

Diffusion of cooperative molecular motors displaying bidirectional motion — •Ernesto M. Nicola and Benjamin Lindner — Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany

The movement of motor proteins along filaments forming part of the cytoskeleton is usually directional. However, recently it has been observed experimentally that collections of certain motor proteins can move bidirectionally [1]. This bidirectional motion can be described, as proposed by Badoual et al. [2], by a two-state model with many particles attached to a rigid backbone. We contrast this model with a even simpler description based on an active Brownian particle dynamics. This simple description is shown to capture the main features of the more complex ratchet model. In particular, we predict that there should exist a critical force for which the effective diffusion coefficient jumps from very large values to small ones [3]. This critical force applied to the backbone separates a region of giant diffusion from a regime of reliable directed transport.

[1] Endow and Higuchi, Nature 406, 913 (2000).

[2] Badoual, Jülicher and Prost, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 99 (2002).

[3] Lindner and Nicola, Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 190603 (2008).