Recycling controls membrane domains

TL;DR

This paper models the impact of recycling on membrane domain coarsening, providing analytical solutions for steady state distributions and relaxation times, which can be compared with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a mathematical framework for membrane domain coarsening with recycling, deriving exact solutions for steady states and dynamics under different recycling schemes.

Findings

Exact steady state distributions derived for both recycling types.

Analytical expressions for relaxation times of domain moments.

Model parameters can be experimentally determined.

Abstract

We study the coarsening of strongly microphase separated membrane domains in the presence of recycling of material. We study the dynamics of the domain size distribution under both scale-free and size-dependent recycling. Closed form solutions to the steady state distributions and its associated central moments are obtained in both cases. Moreover, for the size-independent case, the~time evolution of the moments is analytically calculated, which provide us with exact results for their corresponding relaxation times. Since these moments and relaxation times are measurable quantities, the biophysically significant free parameters in our model may be determined by comparison with experimental data.