Elastic Brownian ratchet

A mechanism to explain what propels the membrane forward, called the elastic Brownian ratchet model, is based on the elastic mechanical property of an actin filament (Figure... 

Peskin et al [1993] have proposed the Brownian ratchet theory to describe the active force production. The main component of that theory was the interaction between a rigid protein and a diffusing object in front of it. If the object undergoes a Brownian motion, and the fiber undergoes polymerization, there are rates at which the polymer can push the object and overcome the external resistance. The problem was formulated in terms of a system of reaction-diffusion equations for the probabilities of the polymer to have certain number of monomers. Two limiting cases, fast diffusion and fast polymerization, were treated analytically that resulted in explicit force/velocity relationships. This theory was subsequently extended to elastic objects and to the transient attachment of the filament to the object. The correspondence of these models to recent experimental data is discussed in the article by Mogilner and Oster [2003]. 

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