A nonequilibrium diffusion and capture mechanism ensures tip-localization of regulating proteins on dynamic filaments

TL;DR

This paper investigates how diffusion and capture mechanisms localize regulatory proteins on dynamic filaments, revealing their efficiency and spatial correlations through a lattice gas model aligned with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a lattice gas model to analyze diffusion and capture effects on protein localization, providing an analytic approximation that matches experimental observations.

Findings

Capture mechanism localizes proteins effectively.

Large-scale spatial correlations are induced by capture.

Diffusion and capture are most efficient at physiological enzyme concentrations.

Abstract

Diffusive motion of regulatory enzymes on biopolymers with eventual capture at a reaction site is a common feature in cell biology. Using a lattice gas model we study the impact of diffusion and capture for a microtubule polymerase and a depolymerase. Our results show that the capture mechanism localizes the proteins and creates large-scale spatial correlations. We develop an analytic approximation that globally accounts for relevant correlations and yields results that are in excellent agreement with experimental data. Our results show that diffusion and capture operates most efficiently at cellular enzyme concentrations which points to in vivo relevance.