Frictional drag produced by motor proteins during cargo transport

Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Madras - Chennai 60036, India

Received: 20 September 2020
Accepted: 26 February 2021

Abstract

When transporting cellular cargoes along the cytoskeletal filament track, motor proteins produce additional frictional drag. This “protein friction” determines the mean speed of a cargo for a given force and the energy dissipated per chemical cycle. Motor protein friction has been measured directly in an optical tweezer experiment, and can also be estimated from the force-velocity curve, close to stall. We present a mathematical and computational study of this phenomenon. In our model, a motor protein is elastically linked to a μm-sized cargo particle, and undergoes tightly coupled, biased random walk-like motion on the microtubule filament, the bias being contributed by nucleotide hydrolysis as well as stretching of the linker “spring”, with spring constant κ. The cytoplasm is assumed to be a Newtonian fluid, which exerts a damping force on the cargo moving with velocity V. The effective drag coefficient is measured in our numerical simulations, where F is the net external force on the cargo, including motor-induced force, near F = 0. The motor friction is predicted theoretically and compared with simulation data for a range of values of κ and γ. The predicted values for small γ are found to be similar to experimental results, though smaller in magnitude. Numerical simulations also show that is a weakly increasing function of γ, and is additive when multiple motors are involved in transportation.