Stochastic single-molecule dynamics of synaptic membrane protein domains

Department of Physics & Astronomy and Molecular and Computational Biology Program, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California - Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA

Received: 8 September 2016
Accepted: 17 October 2016

Abstract

Motivated by single-molecule experiments on synaptic membrane protein domains, we use a stochastic lattice model to study protein reaction and diffusion processes in crowded membranes. We find that the stochastic reaction-diffusion dynamics of synaptic proteins provide a simple physical mechanism for collective fluctuations in synaptic domains, the molecular turnover observed at synaptic domains, key features of the single-molecule trajectories observed for synaptic proteins, and spatially inhomogeneous protein lifetimes at the cell membrane. Our results suggest that central aspects of the single-molecule and collective dynamics observed for membrane protein domains can be understood in terms of stochastic reaction-diffusion processes at the cell membrane.