Traffic of Molecular Motors Through Tube-Like Compartments

By Stefan Klumpp, Reinhard Lipowsky. 2003

199 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The traffic of molecular motors through open tube-like compartments is studied using lattice models. These models exhibit boundary-induced phase transitions related to those of the asymmetric simple exclusion process (ASEP) in one dimension. The location of the transition lines depends on the boundary conditions at the two ends of the tubes. Three types of boundary conditions are studied: (A) Periodic boundary conditions which correspond to a closed torus-like tube. (B) Fixed motor densities at the two tube ends where radial equilibrium holds locally; and (C) Diffusive motor injection at one end and diffusive motor extraction at the other end. In addition to the phase diagrams, we also determine the profiles for the bound and unbound motor densities using mean field approximations and Monte Carlo simulations. Our theoretical predictions are accessible to experiments.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Mathematical Physics, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e498d4a60b4ff6469965f41f868ea6b53a8f058

Citations in the corpus

• Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics: from a paradigmatic model to biological transport (2011, unknown): “In this simplified geometry, the diffusion of motors within the tube can be explicitly modeled [294].”