Coarsening and accelerated equilibration in mass-conserving heterogeneous nucleation

Abstract

We propose a model of mass-conserving heterogeneous nucleation to describe the dynamics of ligand-receptor binding in closed cellular compartments. When the ligand dissociation rate is small, competition among receptors for free ligands gives rise to two very different long-time ligand-receptor cluster size distributions. Cluster sizes first plateau to a long-lived, initial-condition dependent, "metastable" distribution, and coarsen only much later to a qualitatively different equilibrium one. Surprisingly, we also find parameters for which a very special subset of clusters have equal metastable and equilibrium sizes, appearing to equilibrate much faster than the rest. Our results provide a quantitative framework for ligand binding kinetics and suggest a mechanism by which different clusters can approach their equilibrium sizes in unexpected ways.

8 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Exhaustion of Nucleation in a Closed System

Cited by in corpus (5)

• First passage times in homogeneous nucleation and self-assembly
• Stochastic self-assembly of incommensurate clusters
• Exact steady-state distributions of multispecies birth-death-immigration processes: effects of mutations and carrying capacity on diversity
• First passage times in homogeneous nucleation: dependence on the total number of particles
• Stochastic model of randomly end-linked polymer network micro-regions