Tug-of-war in motility assay experiments

Abstract

The dynamics of two groups of molecular motors pulling in opposite directions on a rigid filament is studied theoretically. To this end we first consider the behavior of one set of motors pulling in a single direction against an external force using a new mean-field approach. Based on these results we analyze a similar setup with two sets of motors pulling in opposite directions in a tug-of-war in the presence of an external force. In both cases we find that the interplay of fluid friction and protein friction leads to a complex phase diagram where the force-velocity relations can exhibit regions of bistability and spontaneous symmetry breaking. Finally, motivated by recent work, we turn to the case of motility assay experiments where motors bound to a surface push on a bundle of filaments. We find that, depending on the absence or the presence of a bistability in the force-velocity curve at zero force, the bundle exhibits anomalous or biased diffusion on long-time and large-length scales.

References in corpus (2)

• Tug-of-war as a cooperative mechanism for bidirectional cargo transport by molecular motors
• Non-equilibrium phase transitions in tubulation by molecular motors

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Stochastic dynamics of small ensembles of non-processive molecular motors: the parallel cluster model
• Tug-of-war of molecular motors: the effects of uneven load sharing
• Active elastohydrodynamics of vesicles in narrow, blind constrictions
• Rectification of spatial disorder
• Motor-driven Dynamics of Cytoskeletal FIlaments in Motility Assays
• Biased transport of elastic cytoskeletal filaments with alternating polarities by molecular motors
• First passage time distribution for a random walker on a random forcing energy landscape
• Muscle contraction and the elasticity-mediated crosstalk effect