Anomalous, non-Gaussian tracer diffusion in heterogeneously crowded environments

TL;DR

This study uses extensive simulations to explore how heterogeneous crowding in biological environments causes anomalous, non-Gaussian diffusion of particles, revealing asymmetric spreading and position-dependent diffusivity relevant to cellular processes.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates how heterogeneously crowded environments induce anomalous, non-Gaussian tracer diffusion with position-dependent properties, supported by comprehensive simulation analysis.

Findings

Heterogeneous crowder distributions cause strongly non-Gaussian diffusion.

Tracer spreading is highly asymmetric at moderate crowding levels.

Diffusivity varies with position in the crowded domain.

Abstract

A topic of intense current investigation pursues the question how the highly crowded environment of biological cells affects the dynamic properties of passively diffusing particles. Motivated by recent experiments we report results of extensive simulations of the motion of a finite sized tracer particle in a heterogeneously crowded environment. For given spatial distributions of monodisperse crowders we demonstrate how anomalous diffusion with strongly non-Gaussian features arises in this model system. We investigate both biologically relevant situations of particles released either at the surface of an inner domain (nucleus), or at the outer boundary (cell membrane), exhibiting distinctly different behaviour of the observed anomalous diffusion for heterogeneous crowder distributions. Specifically we reveal an extremely asymmetric spreading of the tracer even at moderate crowding fractions. In addition to the standard mean squared displacement and the local diffusion exponent of the tracer particles we investigate the magnitude and the amplitude scatter of the time averaged mean squared displacement of individual trajectories, the non-Gaussianity parameter, and the van Hove correlation function of the particle displacements. We also quantify how the average tracer diffusivity varies with the position in the domain with heterogeneous radial distribution of the crowders and examine the behaviour of the survival probability and the dynamics of first passage events of the tracer. Finally, we discuss the relevance of our results to single particle tracking measurements in biological cells.