Eur. Phys. J. B 64, 593-600 (2008)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2008-00073-5

Intra-cellular traffic: bio-molecular motors on filamentary tracks

¹ Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur 208016, India
² Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne, 50937 Köln, Germany
³ Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Faculty of Engineering, University of Tokyo, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan

Corresponding author: ^a debch@iitk.ac.in

Received: 9 September 2007
Revised: 28 December 2007
Published online: 22 February 2008

Abstract

Molecular motors are macromolecular complexes which use some form of input energy to perform mechanical work. The filamentary tracks, on which these motors move, are made of either proteins (e.g., microtubules) or nucleic acids (DNA or RNA). Often, many such motors move simultaneously on the same track and their collective properties have superficial similarities with vehicular traffic on highways. The models we have developed provide “unified” description: in the low-density limit, a model captures the transport properties of a single motor while, at higher densities the same model accounts for the collective spatio-temporal organization of interacting motors. By drawing analogy with vehicular traffic, we have introduced novel quantities for characterizing the nature of the spatio-temporal organization of molecular motors on their tracks. We show how the traffic-like intracellular collective phenomena depend on the mechano-chemistry of the corresponding individual motors.