Motor

We develop a theory of steady-state overlap length which depends on the filament plus-end motor concentration, determined by a balance between motor arrival and motor departure in the absence of motor-driven sliding.

Hui-Shun Kuan's paper with Daniel Goldman's group at Georgia Tech on traffic jam avoidance in fire ant tunnel digging has been published in Science and covered in the New York Times , Washington Post , Houston Chronicle , SF Gate , Scientific American , Science News , Ars Technica , BBC , Cosmos , Discover , Popular Mechanics , and Quartz .

Groups of interacting active particles, insects, or humans can form clusters that hinder the goals of the collective. We find that digging performance can be robustly optimized within the constraints of narrow tunnels by individual idleness and retreating.

Inspired by experiments on the motion of kinesin-4 motors on antiparallel microtubule overlaps, we analyze a model incorporating the TASEP on two antiparallel lanes with binding kinetics and lane switching.

Biopolymers serve as one-dimensional tracks on which motor proteins move. These phenomena have inspired theoretical models of one-dimensional transport, crowding, and jamming.

When chromosomes are being separated in preparation for cell division, their motions are slow relative to the speed at which many motor enzymes can move their cellular cargoes and at which microtubules depolymerize.

Regulating physical size is an essential problem that biological organisms must solve, but it is not well understood what physical principles and mechanisms organisms use to sense and regulate their size.

Proteins from the kinesin-8 family promote microtubule depolymerization, a process thought to be important for the control of microtubule length in living cells.

Helicases are molecular motors that unwind double-stranded nucleic acids. Here we model a helicase motor that can switch between two states, which could represent two different points in the ATP hydrolysis cycle.

his paper presents a theoretical study of the coupling between helicase translocation and nucleic acid unwinding.