Eur. Phys. J. E (2022) 45: 28
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/s10189-022-00181-7

Regular Article - Living Systems

Effect of varying load in moving period of a step on dynamics of molecular motors

Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100190, Beijing, China

^a pxie@aphy.iphy.ac.cn

Received: 6 December 2021
Accepted: 2 March 2022
Published online: 23 March 2022

Abstract

During the processive stepping of a molecular motor on its polar track, a step consists of a long dwell period and a very short moving period. In single molecule optical trapping experiments to determine the load dependence of the motor dynamics, although the motor experiences a constant load during the dwell period, it experiences a varying load during the moving period. However, in previous theoretical studies to explain the single molecule optical trapping data, it was simply assumed that the motor experiences a constant load during both the dwell period and the following moving period. Thus, an important but unclear issue is whether the assumption is appropriate in the theoretical studies. Here, we take kinesin and myosin-V as examples to study theoretically the motor dynamics with the consideration of the varying load during the moving period and compare with that with the assumption of the constant load. The studies show that in the optical trapping experiments employed in the literature, for the kinesin with a small step size of about 8 nm it is a good approximation to make the theoretical studies by assuming that the motor experiences the constant load during the moving period. For the myosin-V with a large step size of about 36 nm, there are small but noticeable deviations of the results obtained by considering that the motor experiences the varying load during the moving period from those by assuming that the motor experiences the constant load.