Intra-cellular traffic: bio-molecular motors on filamentary tracks

TL;DR

This paper develops unified models for molecular motor traffic on filamentary tracks, capturing both individual and collective behaviors, and introduces new measures to characterize their spatio-temporal organization based on vehicular traffic analogies.

Contribution

It presents a unified modeling framework for molecular motor traffic, linking single-motor and collective dynamics, and introduces novel quantities for analyzing their organization.

Findings

Models accurately describe single and collective motor transport.

Traffic-like phenomena depend on motor mechano-chemistry.

New measures characterize spatio-temporal organization.

Abstract

Molecular motors are macromolecular complexes which use some form of input energy to perform mechanical work. The filamentary tracks, on which these motors move, are made of either proteins (e.g., microtubules) or nucleic acids (DNA or RNA). Often, many such motors move simultaneously on the same track and their collective properties have superficial similarities with vehicular traffic on highways. The models we have developed provide ``unified'' description: in the low-density limit, a model captures the transport properties of a single motor while, at higher densities the same model accounts for the collective spatio-temporal organization of interacting motors. By drawing analogy with vehicular traffic, we have introduced novel quantities for characterizing the nature of the spatio-temporal organization of molecular motors on their tracks. We show how the traffic-like intracellular collective phenomena depend on the mechano-chemistry of the corresponding individual motors.