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Abstract
Studies of molecular motors and their cargo moving within cells have revealed that they can be trapped for long periods of times. Researchers show that this trapping can occur when the motors encounter intersections of cytoskeletal filaments within cells.
Highlights
Individual microscopic particles can be tracked in cells
We introduce a minimal model of motors moving on a two-dimensional network of filaments, and simulations of its dynamics exhibit statistics comparable to those observed experimentally
In certain cases [9,14], the mean-square displacement (MSD) decays as the amount of data included in averages increases; this trend indicates a power-law distribution of dwell times and is known as “aging” in theories of glassy dynamics [16]
Summary
Individual microscopic particles (beads [1,2] or fluorescently labeled molecules [3,4,5]) can be tracked in cells. The molecular simulations of the model predict more trapping for increased numbers of binding sites: both the lag-time and the aging exponents decrease with larger M [Figs. In contrast to the results that we obtain for motion on a random filament network, a simple tug-of-war scenario with a motor between two antiparallel filaments yields no glassy dynamics, independent of the number of binding sites. Having captured the statistics of experiments, we seek to use the model to elucidate the microscopic motions that underlie the statistics In this regard, we notice that motors frequently exhibit vortexlike motions in which they steadily cycle from one filament to another at a junction [Fig. 4].
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