Intra-cellular transport of single-headed molecular motors KIF1A

Abstract

Motivated by experiments on single-headed kinesin KIF1A, we develop a model of intra-cellular transport by interacting molecular motors. It captures explicitly not only the effects of ATP hydrolysis, but also the ratchet mechanism which drives individual motors. Our model accounts for the experimentally observed single molecule properties in the low density limit and also predicts a phase diagram that shows the influence of hydrolysis and Langmuir kinetics on the collective spatio-temporal organization of the motors. Finally, we provide experimental evidence for the existence of domain walls in our {\it in-vitro} experiment with fluorescently labeled KIF1A.