Optical techniques provide information on various effective diffusion coefficients in the presence of traps

Abstract

In many cell-signaling pathways information is transmitted via the diffusion of messenger molecules. In most cases, messengers react with other substances and diffuse at the same time. Effective diffusion coefficients may be introduced to characterize the net transport rate that results from the combined effect of these two processes. It was shown in [B. Pando, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 103, 5338 (2006)] that even in the simplest scenario in which one bimolecular reaction is involved, two different effective coefficients are relevant. One gives the rate at which small perturbations spread out with time while the other relates the mean square displacement of a single particle to the time elapsed. They coincide in the absence of reactions but may be very different in other cases. Optical techniques provide a relatively noninvasive means by which transport rates can be estimated. In the above mentioned paper it was discussed why, under certain conditions, fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP), a technique commonly used to estimate diffusion rates in cells, provides information on one of the two effective coefficients. In the present paper we show that, under the same conditions, another commonly used optical technique, fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), gives information on the other one. This opens up the possibility of combining experiments to obtain information that goes beyond effective transport rates. In the present paper we discuss different ways to do so.