Stochastic single-molecule dynamics of synaptic membrane protein domains

TL;DR

This study uses a stochastic lattice model to analyze the reaction and diffusion behaviors of synaptic membrane proteins, revealing mechanisms behind their collective fluctuations, turnover, and spatial inhomogeneity observed in experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic reaction-diffusion model that explains key experimental observations of synaptic membrane protein dynamics.

Findings

Reveals a physical mechanism for collective fluctuations in synaptic domains

Explains molecular turnover observed at synaptic domains

Accounts for spatially inhomogeneous protein lifetimes

Abstract

Motivated by single-molecule experiments on synaptic membrane protein domains, we use a stochastic lattice model to study protein reaction and diffusion processes in crowded membranes. We find that the stochastic reaction-diffusion dynamics of synaptic proteins provide a simple physical mechanism for collective fluctuations in synaptic domains, the molecular turnover observed at synaptic domains, key features of the single-molecule trajectories observed for synaptic proteins, and spatially inhomogeneous protein lifetimes at the cell membrane. Our results suggest that central aspects of the single-molecule and collective dynamics observed for membrane protein domains can be understood in terms of stochastic reaction-diffusion processes at the cell membrane.