Mostly Biomathematics Lunchtime Seminar

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Diffusivity and cooperativity in intracellular transport by nonprocessive motors

Speaker: Chris Miles, New York University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1314

Date: Tuesday, November 13, 2018, 12:30 p.m.

Synopsis:

Molecular motor proteins (e.g. kinesin) can be roughly be categorized into those that are processive, meaning they take many steps (hundreds) before detaching and nonprocessive, which take very few. Processive motors have received widespread attention from both theorists and experimentalists over the last few decades, but their nonprocessive counterparts remain far more elusive. In this talk, I’ll discuss two projects both dealing with transport mediated by these nonprocessive motors. The first asks: how do these motors act cooperatively to transport longer distances than you might expect? To address this, we formulate a switching SDE model and use renewal theory to study the asymptotic behavior. The second project tries to untangle underlying causes of diffusive statistics (linear mean-squared displacements) observed in data from nonprocessive motors.