Multiscale Dynamic Modeling of Flexibility in Myosin V

Abstract

This paper presents a multiscale dynamic model for the simulation and analysis of flexibility in myosin V. A three dimensional (3D) flexible multibody model is developed to mechanically model the biological structure of myosin V. Experimental studies have shown that myosin’s neck domain can be considered as three pairs of tandem elements which can bend at junctures between them. Therefore, each neck is modeled by three rigid bodies connected by flexible spherical joints. One of the most important issues in dynamic modeling of micro-nanoscale sized biological structures, likes DNA and motor proteins, is the long simulation run time due to the disproportionality between physical parameters involved in their dynamics such as mass, drag coefficient, and stiffness. In order to address this issue, the mostly used models, based on the famous overdamped Langevin dynamics, omit the inertial terms in the equations of motion; that leads to a first order model which is inconsistent with the Newton’s second law. However, the proposed model uses the concept of the method of multiple scales (MMS) that brings all terms of the equations of motion into proportion with each other that helps to retain the inertia terms. This keeps consistency of the model with the physical laws and increases time step size of numerical integration from commonly used sub-femto seconds to sub-milli seconds. Therefore, simulation run time will be many orders of magnitude less than ones based on the other approaches. The simulation results obtained by the proposed multiscale model show more realistic dynamic behavior of myosin V in compared with other models.