2008/01/15 by Debashish Chowdhury, D. Chowdhury, A. Basu +11
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Chemistry · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Microtubule and mitosis dynamics #Nanopore and Nanochannel Transport Studies #Supramolecular Chemistry and Complexes #cond-mat.stat-mech #physics.bio-ph #q-bio.SC
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epjb/e2008-00073-5
published as European Physical Journal B, vol. 64, p. 593 (2008). · 9 pages, 11 figures; Based on the invited talk delivered by the first author (DC) at the IUPAP International Conference STATPHYS23, Genoa (Italy), July, 2007
arxiv created 2008/01/15 · openalex publication_date 2008/02/21 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Molecular motors are macromolecular complexes which use some form of input energy to perform mechanical work. The filamentary tracks, on which these motors move, are made of either proteins (e.g., microtubules) or nucleic acids (DNA or RNA). Often, many such motors move simultaneously on the same track and their collective properties have superficial similarities with vehicular traffic on highways. The models we have developed provide ``unified'' description: in the low-density limit, a model captures the transport properties of a single motor while, at higher densities the same model accounts for the collective spatio-temporal organization of interacting motors. By drawing analogy with vehicular traffic, we have introduced novel quantities for characterizing the nature of the spatio-temporal organization of molecular motors on their tracks. We show how the traffic-like intracellular collective phenomena depend on the mechano-chemistry of the corresponding individual motors.