Cooperative effects enhance the transport properties of molecular spider teams

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel design for molecular spider teams that enhances their transport efficiency by tuning their collective dynamics, achieving nearly ballistic motion for faster, more predictable molecular transport.

Contribution

It presents a theoretical framework and simulation validation for coupled molecular spider teams, demonstrating how their dynamics can be optimized for improved transport properties.

Findings

Spider teams can behave nearly ballistically, enabling fast transport.

Coupling multiple spiders significantly alters their collective dynamics.

Optimal parameters exist for maximizing directionality and predictability.

Abstract

Molecular spiders are synthetic molecular motors based on DNA nanotechnology. While natural molecular motors have evolved towards very high efficiency, it remains a major challenge to develop efficient designs for man-made molecular motors. Inspired by biological motor proteins like kinesin and myosin, molecular spiders comprise a body and several legs. The legs walk on a lattice that is coated with substrate which can be cleaved catalytically. We propose a novel molecular spider design in which n spiders form a team. Our theoretical considerations show that coupling several spiders together alters the dynamics of the resulting team significantly. Although spiders operate at a scale where diffusion is dominant, spider teams can be tuned to behave nearly ballistic, which results in fast and predictable motion. Based on the separation of time scales of substrate and product dwell times, we develop a theory which utilises equivalence classes to coarse-grain the micro-state space. In addition, we calculate diffusion coefficients of the spider teams, employing a mapping of an n-spider team to an n-dimensional random walker on a confined lattice. We validate these results with Monte Carlo simulations and predict optimal parameters of the molecular spider team architecture which makes their motion most directed and maximally predictable.