Journal
SOFT MATTER
Volume 13, Issue 11, Pages 2181-2191Publisher
ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/c6sm02568d
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Funding
- Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)
- Flemish Government - department EWI
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Inspired by recent experiments on the dynamics of particles and polymers in artificial cytoskeletons and in cells, we introduce a modified Langevin equation for a particle in an environment that is a viscoelastic medium and that is brought out of equilibrium by the action of active fluctuations caused by molecular motors. We show that within such a model, the motion of a free particle crosses over from superdiffusive to subdiffusive as observed for tracer particles in an in vitro cytoskeleton or in a cell. We investigate the dynamics of a particle confined by a harmonic potential as a simple model for the motion of the tethered head of kinesin-1. We find that the probability that the head is close to its binding site on the microtubule can be enhanced by a factor of two due to active forces. Finally, we study the dynamics of a particle in a double well potential as a model for the dynamics of DNA-hairpins. We show that the active forces effectively lower the potential barrier between the two minima and study the impact of this phenomenon on the zipping/unzipping rate.
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