Enhanced reaction kinetics in biological cells

By Claude Loverdo, Olivier Bénichou, Michel Moreau, Raphael Voituriez. 2008

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The cell cytoskeleton is a striking example of an ‘active’ medium driven out-of-equilibrium by ATP hydrolysis1. Such activity has been shown to have a spectacular impact on the mechanical and rheological properties of the cellular medium2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, as well as on its transport properties11,12,13,14: a generic tracer particle freely diffuses as in a standard equilibrium medium, but also intermittently binds with random interaction times to motor proteins, which perform active ballistic excursions along cytoskeletal filaments. Here, we propose an analytical model of transport-limited reactions in active media, and show quantitatively how active transport can enhance reactivity for large enough tracers such as vesicles. We derive analytically the average interaction time with motor proteins that optimizes the reaction rate, and reveal remarkable universal features of the optimal configuration. We discuss why active transport may be beneficial in various biological examples: cell cytoskeleton, membranes and lamellipodia, and tubular structures such as axons1.

Subfields: Cell Biology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9300b758186dbb99e7f0a09128758f6acd6f21f6

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In Cell Biology

Paul C. Bressloff

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Stochastic switching in biology: from genotype to phenotype (2017, unknown): “6), and biochemical reaction kinetics [170].”
Stochastic models of intracellular transport (2013, background): “This has motivated a class of mesoscopic models that take the form of a system of PDEs (Bressloff and Newby, 2009; Friedman and Craciun, 2006; Jung and Brown, 2009; Kuznetsov and Avramenko, 2008; Loverdo et al., 2008; Newby and Bressloff, 2010b; Reed et al., 1990; Smith and Simmons, 2001).”
Intermittent search strategies (2011, methodology): “An analytical model based on the idea of intermittence has been introduced in Loverdo et al. (2008) (see also Loverdo et al. (2009a); Mirny (2008)), and enables the determination of the kinetic constant of transport limited reactions in active media, and further shows that the kinetic constant can…”