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Engineering Approaches to Biomolecular Motors: From in vitro to in vivo Poster Abstracts
64
12-POS
Board 12
Geometrical Theories of Optimization of Molecular Motors
Alexandra K. Kasper
, David A. Sivak.
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada.
Molecular motors, whether biological or synthetic, operate in highly fluctuating environments
and are perpetually operating in a nonequilibrium state. As a result, equilibrium statistical
mechanics is not a sufficient framework for discussing the operation and efficiency of molecular
motors. In the pursuit of a general framework for these stochastic, nonequilibrium systems,
significant theoretical research has focused on systems driven by time-dependent control
parameters. Considering an operating motor as a system driven through state space by external
controls is a promising framework for predicting average system response, identifying minimum-
dissipation control parameter schedules, and potentially elucidating the design of minimally-
dissipative systems for given external controls. The diverse collection of recent work spans from
an analog of the quantum mechanical geometrical Berry phase that predicts the average number
of rotations of F1-ATPase driven by a rotating magnetic field, to a geometric view of
thermodynamic state space that predicts the dissipation associated with particular control
schedules. I will highlight the current ideas in this area and provide an argument for unifying
existing geometrical theories of molecular motors.