Hitchhiking Through the Cytoplasm

Details Hitchhiking Through the Cytoplasm Hitchhiking Through the Cytoplasm

2006-08-24

arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0608540v1

Physics

Condensed Matter

Soft Condensed Matter

Scientific paper

We propose an alternative mechanism for intracellular cargo transport which results from motor induced longitudinal fluctuations of cytoskeletal microtubules (MT). The longitudinal fluctuations combined with transient cargo binding to the MTs lead to long range transport even for cargos and vesicles having no molecular motors on them. The proposed transport mechanism, which we call ``hitchhiking'', provides a consistent explanation for the broadly observed yet still mysterious phenomenon of bidirectional transport along MTs. We show that cells exploiting the hitchhiking mechanism can effectively up- and down-regulate the transport of different vesicles by tuning their binding kinetics to characteristic MT oscillation frequencies.

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