Assessing the Impact of Electrostatic Drag on Processive Molecular Motor Transport

The bidirectional movement of intracellular cargo is usually described as a tug-of-war among opposite-directed families of molecular motors. While tug-of-war models have enjoyed some success, recent evidence suggests underlying motor interactions are more complex than previously understood. For example, these tug-of-war models fail to predict the counterintuitive phenomenon that inhibiting one family of motors can decrease the functionality of opposite-directed transport. In this paper, we use a stochastic differential equations modeling framework to explore one proposed physical mechanism, called microtubule tethering, that could play a role in this "co-dependence" among antagonistic motors. This hypothesis includes the possibility of a trade-off: weakly bound trailing molecular motors can serve as tethers for cargoes and processing motors, thereby enhancing motor-cargo run lengths along microtubules; however, this introduces a cost of processing at a lower mean velocity. By computing the small- and large-time mean-squared displacement of our theoretical model and comparing our results to experimental observations of dynein and its "helper protein" dynactin, we find some supporting evidence for microtubule tethering interactions. We extrapolate these findings to predict how dynein-dynactin might interact with the opposite-directed kinesin motors and introduce a criterion for when the trade-off is beneficial in simple systems.