Diffusion-limited reactions in dynamic heterogeneous media

Most biochemical reactions in living cells rely on diffusive search for target molecules or regions in a heterogeneous overcrowded cytoplasmic medium. Rapid rearrangements of the medium constantly change the effective diffusivity felt locally by a diffusing particle and thus impact the distribution...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2018-10, Vol.9 (1), p.4398-16, Article 4398
Main Authors: Lanoiselée, Yann, Moutal, Nicolas, Grebenkov, Denis S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/57/2283
639/638/440/950
639/766/530/2804
639/766/747
Biological Physics
Brownian motion
Chemical Physics
Computational Physics
Condensed Matter
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Diffusion
Humanities and Social Sciences
Kinetics
Mathematical Physics
Models, Theoretical
multidisciplinary
Physics
Reaction kinetics
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Statistical Mechanics
Time Factors
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Summary:Most biochemical reactions in living cells rely on diffusive search for target molecules or regions in a heterogeneous overcrowded cytoplasmic medium. Rapid rearrangements of the medium constantly change the effective diffusivity felt locally by a diffusing particle and thus impact the distribution of the first-passage time to a reaction event. Here, we investigate the effect of these dynamic spatiotemporal heterogeneities onto diffusion-limited reactions. We describe a general mathematical framework to translate many results for ordinary homogeneous Brownian motion to heterogeneous diffusion. In particular, we derive the probability density of the first-passage time to a reaction event and show how the dynamic disorder broadens the distribution and increases the likelihood of both short and long trajectories to reactive targets. While the disorder slows down reaction kinetics on average, its dynamic character is beneficial for a faster search and realization of an individual reaction event triggered by a single molecule. “Diffusing diffusivity” concept has been recently put forward to account for rapid structural rearrangements in soft matter and biological systems. Here the authors propose a general mathematical framework to compute the distribution of first-passage times in a dynamically heterogeneous medium.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-018-06610-6