Influence of direct motor-motor interaction in models for cargo transport by a single team of motors

TL;DR

This study models cargo transport by multiple motors, revealing that motor interactions significantly affect force-velocity relations and run length, with implications for understanding microtubule traffic phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a model incorporating direct motor-motor interactions and back steps, analyzing their effects on cargo transport dynamics.

Findings

Interactions reduce stall force and run length.

Multiple tracks mitigate interaction effects.

Motor back steps influence cargo processivity.

Abstract

We analyze theoretically the effects of excluded-volume interactions between motors on the dynamics of a cargo driven by multiple motors. The model considered shares many commons with other recently proposed in the literature, with the addition of direct interaction between motors and motor back steps. The cargo is assumed to follow a continuum Langevin dynamics, while individual motors evolve following a Monte Carlo algorithm based on experimentally accessible probabilities for discrete forward and backward jumps, and attachment and detachment rates. The links between cargo and motors are considered as non linear springs. By means of numerical simulations we compute the relevant quantities characterizing the dynamical properties of the system, and we compare the results to those for non interacting motors. We find that interactions lead to quite relevant changes in the force-velocity relation for cargo, with a considerable reduction of the stall force, and cause also a notable decrease of the run length. These effects are mainly due to traffic-like phenomena in the microtubule. The consideration of several parallel tracks for motors reduces such effects. However, we find that for realistic values of the number of motors and the number of tracks, the influence of interactions on the global parameters of transport of cargo are far from being negligible. Our studies provide also an analysis of the relevance of motor back steps on the modeling, and of the influence of different assumptions for the detachment rates. In particular, we discuss these two aspects in connection with the possibility of observing processive back motion of cargo at large load forces.