Analytical aspects of the Brownian motor effect in randomly flashing ratchets

DOI10.1007/S00285-013-0684-4zbMATH Open1294.82031arXiv1302.0253OpenAlexW2111873666WikidataQ46089597 ScholiaQ46089597MaRDI QIDQ2249669FDOQ2249669

Dmitry Vorotnikov

Publication date: 3 July 2014

Published in: Journal of Mathematical Biology (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The muscle contraction, operation of ATP synthase, maintaining the shape of a cell are believed to be secured by motor proteins, which can be modelled using the Brownian ratchet mechanism. We consider the randomly flashing ratchet model of a Brownian motor, where the particles can be in two states, only one of which is sensitive the applied spatially periodic potential (the mathematical setting is a pair of weakly coupled reaction-diffusion and Fokker-Planck equations). We prove that this mechanism indeed generates unidirectional transport by showing that the amount of mass in the wells of the potential decreases/increases from left to right. The direction of transport is unambiguously determined by the location of each minimum of the potential with respect to the so-called diffusive mean of its adjacent maxima. The transport can be generated not only by an asymmetric potential, but also by a symmetric potential and asymmetric transition rates, and as a consequence of the general result we derive explicit conditions when the latter happens. When the transitions are localized on narrow active sites in the protein conformation space, we find a more explicit characterization of the bulk transport direction, and infer that some common preconditions of the motor effect are redundant.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.0253

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zbMATH Keywords

transportFokker-Planck equationstationary solutionflashing ratchetconformationmotor proteinactive sitediffusive mean

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of functional analysis in biology and other sciences (46N60) Linear boundary value problems for ordinary differential equations (34B05) Reaction-diffusion equations (35K57) Fokker-Planck equations (35Q84) PDEs in connection with biology, chemistry and other natural sciences (35Q92) Fixed-point theorems (47H10) Stochastic methods (Fokker-Planck, Langevin, etc.) applied to problems in time-dependent statistical mechanics (82C31) Statistical mechanics of polymers (82D60)

Cites Work

• The Variational Formulation of the Fokker--Planck Equation
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Cited In (5)

• Large-deviation principles of switching Markov processes via Hamilton-Jacobi equations
• On the bulk velocity of Brownian ratchets
• Diffusion-mediated transport and the flashing ratchet.
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Brownian motors: noisy transport far from equilibrium

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