Theory of active transport in filopodia and stereocilia

Abstract

The biological processes in elongated organelles of living cells are often regulated by molecular motor transport. We determined spatial distributions of motors in such organelles, corresponding to a basic scenario when motors only walk along the substrate, bind, unbind, and diffuse. We developed a mean-field model, which quantitatively reproduces elaborate stochastic simulation results as well as provides a physical interpretation of experimentally observed distributions of Myosin IIIa in stereocilia and filopodia. The mean-field model showed that the jamming of the walking motors is conspicuous, and therefore damps the active motor flux. However, when the motor distributions are coupled to the delivery of actin monomers toward the tip, even the concentration bump of G actin that they create before they jam is enough to speed up the diffusion to allow for severalfold longer filopodia. We found that the concentration profile of G actin along the filopodium is rather nontrivial, containing a narrow minimum near the base followed by a broad maximum. For efficient enough actin transport, this nonmonotonous shape is expected to occur under a broad set of conditions. We also find that the stationary motor distribution is universal for the given set of model parameters regardless of the organelle length, which follows from the form of the kinetic equations and the boundary conditions.