PHENOMENOLOGICAL MODELS OF MOTOR PROTEINS BY

Motor proteins produce directional movement and mechanical output in cells by converting chemical energy into mechanical work. Innovative applications of physics experimental tech-niques to the study of motor proteins have generated a wealth of data. By careful analysis and modeling of this data, we try to gain a quantitative understanding of this biological system. We have proposed a way to incorporate the biochemical data on motor proteins into the modeling and thus minimize the number of fitting parameters and increase the rel-evance of the models. Mechanical understanding of motor proteins are obtained by using an experimental technique of observing the motion of a large cargo elastically attached to it. On modeling the effect of the elastic motor-cargo link on the motion of the cargo, we see that the conclusions on motor mechanism derived from such techniques are dependent on the size of the cargo as well as the stiffness of the link. By proposing a new modeling scheme, we devise a unified description of such experiments for various motor proteins. This description is based on the picture that the motor thermal fluctuations are rectified in a pre-ferred direction by means of barriers whose heights are modulated by the chemical reaction