Environmental control of microtubule-based bidirectional cargo transport

Sarah Klein, Cécile Appert-Rolland, Ludger Santen
2014 Europhysics letters  
Inside cells, various cargos are transported by teams of molecular motors. Intriguingly, the motors involved generally have opposite pulling directions, and the resulting cargo dynamics is a biased stochastic motion. It is an open question how the cell can control this bias. Here we develop a model which takes explicitly into account the elastic coupling of the cargo with each motor. We show that bias can be simply controlled or even reversed in a counterintuitive manner via a change in the
more » ... rnal force exerted on the cargo or a variation of the ATP binding rate to motors. Furthermore, the superdiffusive behavior found at short time scales indicates the emergence of motor cooperation induced by cargo-mediated coupling.
doi:10.1209/0295-5075/107/18004 fatcat:jyj5hk3mwrcb5hh722nh2yziiy