Tight Coupling between the Heat Dissipation and Molecular Motor's Transport Properties in Nonequilibrium Steady State

Abstract

Theoretical analysis, which maps single molecule time trajectories of a molecular motor onto unicyclic Markov processes, allows us to evaluate the heat dissipated from the motor and to elucidate its dependence on the mean velocity and diffusivity. Unlike passive Brownian particles in equilibrium, the velocity and diffusion constant of molecular motors are closely inter-related to each other. In particular, our study makes it clear that the increase of diffusivity with the heat production is a natural outcome of active particles, which is reminiscent of the recent experimental premise that the diffusion of an exothermic enzyme is enhanced by the heat released from its own catalytic turnover. Compared with freely diffusing exothermic enzymes, kinesin-1 whose dynamics is confined on one-dimensional tracks is highly efficient in transforming conformational fluctuations into a locally directed motion, thus displaying a significantly higher enhancement in diffusivity with its turnover rate. Putting molecular motors and freely diffusing enzymes on an equal footing, our study offers thermodynamic basis to understand the heat enhanced self-diffusion of exothermic enzymes.Together with recent studies [1][2][3][4], Riedel et al. [5] have demonstrated a rather surprising result, from a perspective of equilibrium statistical mechanics: Diffusion constants (D) of exothermic enzymes, measured from fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), increase linearly with their catalytic turnover rates V cat , so that the enhancement of diffusivity at maximal activity (maximum V cat ) is as large aswhere D 0 and D max are the diffusion constants measured by FCS at V cat = 0 and maximal V cat , respectively. Their enigmatic observation [5] has called much attention of biophysics community to the physical origin of the activity-dependent diffusivity of a single enzyme. Golestanian [6] considered four distinct scenarios (self-thermophoresis, boost in kinetic energy, stochastic swimming, collective heating) to account for this observation quantitatively; however, the extent of enhancement observed in the experiment was still orders of magnitude greater than the theoretical estimates from the suggested mechanisms. Bai et al.[7] also drew a similar conclusion by considering hydrodynamic coupling between the conformational change of enzyme and surrounding media. The experimental demonstration of enzymes' enhanced diffusion with multiple control experiments in Ref.[5] is straightforward; however, physical insight of the observed phenomena is currently missing [5,6,8,9].While seemingly entirely different from freely diffusing enzymes, kinesin-1 [10-15] is also a substrate-catalyzing enzyme. Conformational dynamics of kinesin-1, induced by ATP hydrolysis and thermal fluctuations, is rectified into a unidirectional movement with a high fidelity [16,17]; hydrolysis of a single ATP almost always leads to 8 nm step [18]. Every step of kinesin-1 along 1D tracks, an outcome of cyclic chemical reaction, can be mapped (2)µ, ..., (N )µ denote distinc...