Spontaneous Oscillations of Collective Molecular Motors

TL;DR

This paper models how groups of motor molecules can spontaneously oscillate due to elastic coupling and critical fuel concentration, revealing the physical mechanism behind such oscillatory motion.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic model explaining the emergence of oscillations in collective molecular motors with elastic coupling, including a perturbative analysis near the instability point.

Findings

Oscillations occur above a critical fuel concentration.

Oscillation frequencies are linked to motor timescales.

The model predicts instability leading to spontaneous oscillations.

Abstract

We analyze a simple stochastic model to describe motor molecules which cooperate in large groups and present a physical mechanism which can lead to oscillatory motion if the motors are elastically coupled to their environment. Beyond a critical fuel concentration, the non-moving state of the system becomes unstable with respect to a mode with angular frequency omega. We present a perturbative description of the system near the instability and demonstrate that oscillation frequencies are determined by the typical timescales of the motors.