Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik

CPP 55: Symposium SYAD: Anomalous Diffusion in Complex Environments (BP/CPP/DY, organized by BP)

CPP 55.3: Invited Talk

Thursday, March 10, 2016, 16:00–16:30, H15

Cytoskeleton organization as an optimized, spatially inhomogeneous intermittent search strategy — •Heiko Rieger, Yannick Schröder, and Karsten Schwarz — Theoretical Physics, Saarland University, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany

The efficiency of intracellular transport of cargo from specific source to target locations is strongly dependent upon molecular motor assisted motion along cytoskeleton filaments, microtubules and actin. Radial transport along microtubules and lateral transport along the filaments of the actin cortex underneath the cell membrane are characteristic for cells with a centrosome. Here we show that this specific filament organization for ballistic transport in conjunction with intermittent diffusion realizes a spatially inhomogeneous intermittent search strategy that is in general optimal for small thicknesses oft he actin cortex. We prove optimality in terms of mean first passage times for three different, frequently encountered intracellular transport tasks: 1) the narrow escape problem (e.g. transport of cargo to a synapse or other specific region of the cell membrane), 2) reaction kinetics enhancement (e.g. binding of two mobile reaction partners within the cell), 3) the reaction-escape problem (e.g. release of cargo at a synapse after intracellular vesicle pairing). Since homogeneous search strategies could only be realized by completely filling the search volume with randomly oriented cytoskeleton filaments, our results indicate that living cells realize optimal search strategies for various intracellular transport problems economically through a spatial cytoskeleton organization that involves only small amounts of randomly oriented actin filaments.