Otger Campàs
Universitat de Barcelona
 

Membrane tubes play an important role at intracellular traffic level, in particular for the molecular information transport between various compartments in the cell. Microtuble networks and kinesins motors are directly involved in the creation of such tubes. Here we describe theoretically the dynamics of tube extraction by molecular motors. We characterize analytically the existence of a threshold motor concentration necessary to extract membrane tubes and we show the intrinsic non-equilibrium nature of the process. Moreover, we perform a quantitative analysis of the system by comparing the theoretical results to the experiments performed in a newly designed biomimetic system.

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