Diffusion Mediated Transport in Multiple State Systems



David Kinderlehrer
Department of Mathematical Sciences
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
davidk@andrew.cmu.edu


Stuart Hastings
sph@pitt.edu

J. Bryce McLeod
mcleod@pitt.edu

Department of Mathematics
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Abstract. Intracellular transport in eukarya is attributed to motor proteins that transduce chemical energy into directed mechanical motion. Nanoscale motors like kinesins tow organelles and other cargo on microtubules or filaments, have a role separating the mitotic spindle during the cell cycle, and perform many other functions. The simplest description gives rise to a weakly coupled system of evolution equations. The transport process to the mind's eye, is analogous to a biased coin toss. We describe how this intuition may be confirmed by a careful analysis of the cooperative effect among the conformational changes and the potentials.

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