Non-Markovian intracellular transport with sub-diffusion and run-length dependent detachment rate

Intracellular transport of organelles is fundamental to cell function and health. The mounting evidence suggests that this transport is in fact anomalous. However, the reasons for the anomaly is still under debate. We examined experimental trajectories of organelles inside a living cell and propose...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2018-11, Vol.13 (11), p.e0207436-e0207436
Main Authors: Korabel, Nickolay, Waigh, Thomas A, Fedotov, Sergei, Allan, Viki J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Animals
Behavior
Biological Transport, Active - physiology
Biology
Biology and Life Sciences
Chemical reactions
Cytology
Diffusion
Diffusion barriers
Diffusion rate
Experiments
Filaments
Health
Humans
Intracellular
Kinetics
Lipids
Markov chains
Markov processes
Mathematical models
Microtubules
Microtubules - physiology
Models, Biological
Organelles
Physical Sciences
Reaction kinetics
Trajectories
Transport
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Summary:Intracellular transport of organelles is fundamental to cell function and health. The mounting evidence suggests that this transport is in fact anomalous. However, the reasons for the anomaly is still under debate. We examined experimental trajectories of organelles inside a living cell and propose a mathematical model that describes the previously reported transition from sub-diffusive to super-diffusive motion. In order to explain super-diffusive behaviour at long times, we introduce non-Markovian detachment kinetics of the cargo: the rate of detachment is inversely proportional to the time since the last attachment. Recently, we observed the non-Markovian detachment rate experimentally in eukaryotic cells. Here we further discuss different scenarios of how this effective non-Markovian detachment rate could arise. The non-Markovian model is successful in simultaneously describing the time averaged variance (the time averaged mean squared displacement corrected for directed motion), the mean first passage time of trajectories and the multiple peaks observed in the distributions of cargo velocities. We argue that non-Markovian kinetics could be biologically beneficial compared to the Markovian kinetics commonly used for modelling, by increasing the average distance the cargoes travel when a microtubule is blocked by other filaments. In turn, sub-diffusion allows cargoes to reach neighbouring filaments with higher probability, which promotes active motion along the microtubules.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0207436