Interrogating Emergent Transport Properties for Molecular Motor Ensembles: A Semi-analytical Approach.

Intracellular transport is an essential function in eucaryotic cells, facilitated by motor proteins-proteins converting chemical energy into kinetic energy. It is understood that motor proteins work in teams enabling unidirectional and bidirectional transport of intracellular cargo over long distances. Disruptions of the underlying transport mechanisms, often caused by mutations that alter single motor characteristics, are known to cause neurodegenerative diseases.

An exact approach for studying cargo transport by an ensemble of molecular motors.

Background: Intracellular transport is crucial for many cellular processes where a large fraction of the cargo is transferred by motor-proteins over a network of microtubules. Malfunctions in the transport mechanism underlie a number of medical maladies.Existing methods for studying how motor-proteins coordinate the transfer of a shared cargo over a microtubule are either analytical or are based on Monte-Carlo simulations.

Detection of Steps in Single Molecule Data.

Over the past few decades, single molecule investigations employing optical tweezers, AFM and TIRF microscopy have revealed that molecular behaviors are typically characterized by discrete steps or events that follow changes in protein conformation. These events, that manifest as steps or jumps, are short-lived transitions between otherwise more stable molecular states. A major limiting factor in determining the size and timing of the steps is the noise introduced by the measurement system.

An open source/real-time atomic force microscope architecture to perform customizable force spectroscopy experiments.

We describe the realization of an atomic force microscope architecture designed to perform customizable experiments in a flexible and automatic way. Novel technological contributions are given by the software implementation platform (RTAI-LINUX), which is free and open source, and from a functional point of view, by the implementation of hard real-time control algorithms. Some other technical solutions such as a new way to estimate the optical lever constant are described as well.