Coupling of Active Motion and Advection Shapes Intracellular Cargo Transport

Abstract

Intracellular cargo transport can arise from passive diffusion, active motor-driven transport along cytoskeletal filament networks, and passive advection by fluid flows entrained by such motor/cargo motion. Active and advective transport are thus intrinsically coupled as related, yet different representations of the same underlying network structure. A reaction-advection-diffusion system is used here to show that this coupling affects the transport and localization of a passive tracer in a confined geometry. For sufficiently low diffusion, cargo localization to a target zone is optimized either by low reaction kinetics and decoupling of bound and unbound states, or by a mostly disordered cytoskeletal network with only weak directional bias. These generic results may help to rationalize subtle features of cytoskeletal networks, for example as observed for microtubules in fly oocytes.

arXiv commentrevtex, 5 pages, 5 figures, to appear in PRL (http://prl.aps.org/)

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