Drift-Diffusion Dynamics and Phase Separation in Curved Cell Membranes and Dendritic Spines: Hybrid Discrete-Continuum Methods
arXiv:2110.00725 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.106.044402
Abstract
We develop methods for investigating protein drift-diffusion dynamics in heterogeneous cell membranes and the roles played by geometry, diffusion, chemical kinetics, and phase separation. Our hybrid stochastic numerical methods combine discrete particle descriptions with continuum-level models for tracking the individual protein drift-diffusion dynamics when coupled to continuum fields. We show how our approaches can be used to investigate phenomena motivated by protein kinetics within dendritic spines. The spine geometry is hypothesized to play an important biological role regulating synaptic strength, protein kinetics, and self-assembly of clusters. We perform simulation studies for model spine geometries varying the neck size to investigate how phase-separation and protein organization is influenced by different shapes. We also show how our methods can be used to study the roles of geometry in reaction-diffusion systems including Turing instabilities. Our methods provide general approaches for investigating protein kinetics and drift-diffusion dynamics within curved membrane structures.
References in corpus (7)
- Anomalous transport in the crowded world of biological cells
- An introduction to the Ginzburg-Landau theory of phase transitions and nonequilibrium patterns
- Lateral diffusion of a protein on a fluctuating membrane
- Hybrid Elastic/Discrete-Particle Approach to Biomembrane Dynamics with Application to the Mobility of Curved Integral Membrane Proteins
- Dynamic simulations of multicomponent lipid membranes over long length and time scales
- First-Passage Time Statistics on Surfaces of General Shape: Surface PDE Solvers using Generalized Moving Least Squares (GMLS)
- Stochastic single-molecule dynamics of synaptic membrane protein domains