2015/05/05 by Louis Reese, Reese, Louis, Anna Melbinger +3
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Materials Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Material Dynamics and Properties #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics #Subcellular Processes (q-bio.SC) #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.stat-mech #physics.bio-ph #q-bio.SC
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1505.01219
13 pages, 11 figures
arxiv created 2015/05/05 · openalex publication_date 2015/05/05 · arxiv updated 2015/05/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Here we study a driven lattice gas model for microtubule depolymerizing molecular motors, where traffic jams of motors induce stochastic switching between microtubule growth and shrinkage. We term this phenomenon \enquotetraffic dynamic instability because it is reminiscent of microtubule dynamic instability [T. Mitchison and M. Kirschner, Nature 312, 237 (1984)]. The intermittent dynamics of growth and shrinking emerges from the interplay between the arrival of motors at the microtubule tip, motor induced depolymerization, and motor detachment from the tip. The switching dynamics correlates with low and high motor density on the lattice. This leads to an effectively bistable particle density in the system. A refined domain wall theory predicts this transient appearance of different phases in the system. The theoretical results are supported by stochastic simulations.