2012/05/18 by Yunxin Zhang
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Mathematics · Neuroscience · Physics and Astronomy · #Biology #Biophysics #Cell biology #Dynein #Kinesin #Microtubule #Microtubule and mitosis dynamics #Molecular motor #Motor protein #Neuroscience #Physics #Plant nutrient uptake and metabolism #Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics #physics.bio-ph #q-bio.SC
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epje/i2012-12101-3
published as Eur. Phys. J. E (2012) 35: 101
arxiv created 2012/05/18 · openalex publication_date 2012/10/01 · arxiv updated 2015/03/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In living cells, motor proteins, such as kinesin and dynein can move processively along microtubule (MT), and also detach from or attach to MT stochastically. Experiments have found that, the traffic of motor might be jammed, and various theoretical models have been designed to understand this traffic jam phenomenon. But previous studies mainly focus on motor attachment/detachment rate dependent properties. Recent experiment of Leduc \it et al. found that the traffic jam formation of motor protein kinesin depends also on the length of MT [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. \bf 109, 6100-6105 (2012)]. In this study, the MT length dependent properties of motor traffic will be analyzed. We found that MT length has one \it critical value Nc, traffic jam occurs only when MT length N>Nc. The jammed length of MT increases with total MT length, while the non-jammed MT length might not change monotonically with the total MT length. The critical value Nc increases with motor detachment rate from MT, but decreases with motor attachment rate to MT.