Boundary-bulk interplay of molecular motor traffic flow through a compartment

Abstract

The flow of motor proteins on a filamental track is modelled within the the framework of lattice driven diffusive systems. Motors, considered as hopping particles, perform a highly biased asymmetric exclusion process when bound to the filament. With a certain rate, they detach from the filament and execute unbiased random walk in the bulk which is considered as a closed cubic compartment. Motors are injected (extracted) from the leftmost (rightmost) site of the filament located along the symmetry axis of the compartment. We explore the transport properties of this system and investigate the bulk-boundary interplay on the system stationary states. It is shown that the detachment rate notably affects the system properties. In particular and in contrast to ASEP, it is shown that the density profile of bound particles exhibit different types of non monotonic behaviours when the detachment rate varies. It is shown that in certain situations, the density profile of the filament consists of coexisting high and low regions.