3 ms·
Oh yes, of course there are many motorized processes, but the point is there's no inherent logic to them. A myosin grabs onto a filament and goes to the plus en
by entee 8y ago
Oh yes, of course there are many motorized processes, but the point is there's no inherent logic to them. A myosin grabs onto a filament and goes to the plus end of the actin filament (usually, not some of them, again it gets complicated :) but it doesn't know where that tube is going. It'll just happily move to the end and fall off/get blocked. If the destination "wants" or "needs" supra-diffusion transport, it needs to recruit the tubes to come to it. Every entity in the cell essentially acts as its own agent, and it's only through interactions that it does one thing or another.
EDIT: probably more accurate to call actin "filaments" not tubes, typo
- rrock 8y agoActually, there’s quite a bit of inherent logic to actomyosin traffic networks, as we’re now beginning to discover. For example, myosin 10 has evolved to walk along specific bundles of actin, but not so well along single actin filaments. The bundle has mechanical integrity and leads to a distant location in the cell, and the myosin 10 can detect that the actin is bundled. So in some sense it knows that it is walking along the right structure that leads to that distant location. There are some other examples, but this is all at the cutting edge of motility research.