Microtubule length dependence of motor traffic in cells

Abstract

In living cells, motor proteins, such as kinesin and dynein can move processively along microtubule (MT), and also detach from or attach to MT stochastically. Experiments have found that, the traffic of motor might be jammed, and various theoretical models have been designed to understand this traffic jam phenomenon. But previous studies mainly focus on motor attachment/detachment rate dependent properties. Recent experiment of Leduc {\it et al.} found that the traffic jam formation of motor protein kinesin depends also on the length of MT [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. {\bf 109}, 6100-6105 (2012)]. In this study, the MT length dependent properties of motor traffic will be analyzed. We found that MT length has one {\it critical value} $N_c$, traffic jam occurs only when MT length $N>N_c$. The jammed length of MT increases with total MT length, while the non-jammed MT length might not change monotonically with the total MT length. The critical value $N_c$ increases with motor detachment rate from MT, but decreases with motor attachment rate to MT.

References in corpus (7)

• Tug-of-war as a cooperative mechanism for bidirectional cargo transport by molecular motors
• Phase Coexistence in Driven One Dimensional Transport
• Matrix representation of the stationary measure for the multispecies TASEP
• Exclusion Processes with Internal States
• Crowding of molecular motors determines microtubule depolymerization
• Effects of the chemomechanical stepping cycle on the traffic of molecular motors
• Shocks in asymmetric simple exclusion processes of interacting particles

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Relationship between promoter sequence and its strength in gene expression
• Shock of three-state model for intracellular transport of kinesin KIF1A
• Translation with frameshifting of ribosome along mRNA transcript
• Existence and uniqueness of solution of the differential equation describing the TASEP-LK coupled transport process