Quantitative analysis of approaches to measure cooperative phosphate release in polymerized actin

We use stochastic simulations that treat several experimental probes of actin dynamics to explore the extent to which phosphate dissociation in filamentous actin may be cooperative. Phosphate time-courses from polymerization and copolymerization experiments of ATP- and ADP-actin are studied, including the effects of variations in filament-number concentration as well as single-filament depolymerization time-courses. We find that highly cooperative models are consistent with the treated experimental data. We also find that some types of experiments that are believed to provide strong constraints on the cooperativity of actin hydrolysis models do not provide such constraints.