Helicases are one of the smallest motors of biological system, which harness the chemical free energy of ATP hydrolysis to catalyze the opening of energetically stable duplex nucleic acids and thereby are involved in almost all aspect of nucleic acid metabolism including replication, repair,...

Can the different causes for disruption of intracellular transport be traced from the trajectories of the molecular motors on the cytoskeletal filaments? We will attempt to answer this important question in a Monte Carlo model of microtubule–motor protein interaction from the point of view of...

Molecular motors are single macromolecules that generate forces at the piconewton range and nanometer scale. They convert chemical energy into mechanical work by moving along filamentous structures. In this paper, we study the velocity of two-head molecular motors in the framework of a...

Movements of molecular motors on cytoskeletal filaments are described by directed walks on a line. Detachment from this line is allowed to occur with a small probability. Motion in the surrounding fluid is described by symmetric random walks. Effects of detachment and reattachment are calculated...

A hopping model for molecular motors is presented consisting of a state with asymmetric hopping rates with period 2 and a state with uniform hopping rates. State changes lead to a stationary unidirectional current of a particle. The current is explicitly calculated as a function of the rate of...

By analytical methods we study the large time properties of the solution of a simple one-dimensional model of stochastic Stokes’ drift. Semi-explicit formulae allow us to characterize the behaviour of the solutions and compute global quantities such as the asymptotic speed of the center of...

Statistical theory of any physical process needs a formulation of possibly simple but adequate models of the phenomena underlying microscopic dynamics. Remarkable progress in studies of internal dynamics of biomolecules acomplished in the recent years has made it possible to formulate such...

We present a novel method of computing the asymptotic drift velocity V and the diffusion coefficient D of a particle diffusing in an arbitrary periodic medium. We focus on a particular case of 1D systems with the nearest-neighbor transition rates and explain in detail how our method works in...

Three problems in the statistical mechanics of models for an assembly of molecular motors interacting with cytoskeletal filaments are reviewed. First, a description of the hydrodynamical behaviour of density–density correlations in fluctuating ratchet models for interacting molecular motors is...