Temporally and spatially resolved measurements of protein transport inside cells provide important clues to the functional architecture and dynamics of biological systems. Fluorescence Recovery After Photobleaching (FRAP) technique has been used over the past three decades to measure the mobility of macromolecules and protein transport and interaction with immobile structures inside the cell nucleus. A theoretical model is presented that aims to describe protein transport inside the nucleus, a process which is influenced by the presence of a boundary (i.e. membrane). A set of reaction-diffusion equations is employed to model both the diffusion of proteins and their interaction with immobile binding sites. The proposed model has been designed to be applied to biological samples with a Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope (CLSM) equipped with the feature to bleach regions characterised by a scanning beam that has a radially Gaussian distributed profile. The proposed model leads to FRAP curves that depend on the on- and off-rates. Semi-analytical expressions are used to define the boundaries of on- (off-) rate parameter space in simplified cases when molecules move within a bounded domain. The theoretical model can be used in conjunction to experimental data acquired by CLSM to investigate the biophysical properties of proteins in living cells.
Min-protein oscillations in Escherichia coli with spontaneous formation of two-stranded filaments in a three-dimensional stochastic reaction-diffusion model
A one-dimensional Lattice Boltzmann method for modeling the dynamic pole-to-pole oscillations of Min proteins for determining the position of the midcell division plane
Pattern Formation Beyond Turing: Physical Principles of Mass-Conserving Reaction--Diffusion Systems
Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit\"at M\"unchen, Theresienstra e 37, D-80333 Munich, Germany
Classification of Intracellular Protein Patterns from Reactive Equilibria
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München（慕尼黑大学）；Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics and Center for NanoScience（阿诺德·索末菲理论物理中心与纳米科学中心）；University of California Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）；Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics（卡弗里理论物理研究所）；Max Planck School Matter to Life（马克斯·普朗克物质与生活学院）
