Fluctuations and cooperative properties of molecular motors: from theory to experiments
Résumé
The traffic of molecular motors is often represented by means of Poissonian particles moving on a unidimensional track. However, biological ‘particles’ generally advance with complicated stepping cycles, passing through different biochemical and conformational states. In this contribution we review an extension of the typical exclusion process, the archetypical model of unidimensional transport; we explore it first from a theoretical point of view, and then we show how it has been possible to provide quantitative comparisons to experiments in the context of mRNA translation.