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Updated: Jun 21, 2026

Single-Molecule Imaging of Nuclear Transport
Published on: June 9, 2010
Managing free-energy barriers in nuclear pore transport
Brian Nielsen1, Claus Jeppesen, John H Ipsen
1Department of Physics, MEMPHYS-Centre for Biomembrane Physics, Syddansk Universitet, DK-5230 Odense, Denmark.
Abstract:
The Nuclear Pore Complexes (NPC) facilitate highly selective gateways for transport of macromolecules across the Nuclear Envelope (NE). Based on the current accumulated knowledge of the architecture of NPC we have established a minimal physical model of the pore and the transport mechanism. The barrier properties of the NPC model are analyzed by the recently established Wang-Landau Monte Carlo computer simulation technique and the transport properties are extracted by employing Kramers' theory of reaction rates. We show that our physical model can account for a range of characteristics observed for nuclear pore transport.
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