Molecular motors: design, mechanism and control

Abstract

Biological functions in each animal cell depend on coordinated operations of a wide variety of molecular motors. Some of the these motors transport cargo to their respective destinations whereas some others are mobile workshops which synthesize macromolecules while moving on their tracks. Some other motors are designed to function as packers and movers. All these motors require input energy for performing their mechanical works and operate under conditions far from thermodynamic equilibrium. The typical size of these motors and the forces they generate are of the order of nano-meters and pico-Newtons, respectively. They are subjected to random bombardments by the molecules of the surrounding aqueous medium and, therefore, follow noisy trajectories. Because of their small inertia, their movements in the viscous intracellular space exhibits features that are characteristics of hydrodynamics at low Reynold's number. In this article we discuss how theoretical modeling and computer simulations of these machines by physicists are providing insight into their mechanisms which engineers can exploit to design and control artificial nano-motors.

11 pages, including 8 embedded EPS figures; Invited article, accepted for Publication in "Computing in Science and Engineering" (AIP & IEEE)

References in corpus (7)

• Brownian motors: noisy transport far from equilibrium
• Intra-cellular transport of single-headed molecular motors KIF1A
• Interacting RNA polymerase motors on DNA track: effects of traffic congestion and intrinsic noise on RNA synthesis
• Traffic of interacting ribosomes on mRNA during protein synthesis: effects of chemo-mechanics of individual ribosomes
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• Intra-cellular transport by single-headed kinesin KIF1A: effects of single-motor mechano-chemistry and steric interactions
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• Stochastic mechano-chemical kinetics of molecular motors: a multidisciplinary enterprise from a physicist's perspective
• Designing, Synthesizing and Modeling Active Fluids
• A model for hand-over-hand motion of molecular motors
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