Stochastic single-molecule dynamics of synaptic membrane protein domains

Abstract

Motivated by single-molecule experiments on synaptic membrane protein domains, we use a stochastic lattice model to study protein reaction and diffusion processes in crowded membranes. We find that the stochastic reaction-diffusion dynamics of synaptic proteins provide a simple physical mechanism for collective fluctuations in synaptic domains, the molecular turnover observed at synaptic domains, key features of the single-molecule trajectories observed for synaptic proteins, and spatially inhomogeneous protein lifetimes at the cell membrane. Our results suggest that central aspects of the single-molecule and collective dynamics observed for membrane protein domains can be understood in terms of stochastic reaction-diffusion processes at the cell membrane.

arXiv commentMain text (7 pages, 4 figures, 1 table) and supplementary material (3 pages, 3 figures)

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Stochastic lattice model of synaptic membrane protein domains
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