Modeling of motor protein translocation with stochastic processes.

摘要

Motor proteins are molecules which hydrolyze ATP molecules and use the released energy to perform useful work. Kinesin is a motor protein which displays processivity, or in other words, the ability to travel along microtubules, for a long time without detaching. This property makes it ideal for the functions of vesicle transport, cell division and flagellar and cilliar beating. This study models the walk of kinesin using novel stochastic processes. Comparisons of these models are drawn with the conventional use of modeling kinesin's walk as a cyclic chain of discrete chemical states.