Figure 2. Directed transport velocity and displacement of microtubules driven by mixed active and inactive Kinesin-1 motors.

The total number of active and inactive motors is fixed at $N=100$ for all simulations. $N_A$ is the number of active motors. Left panel: comparison of microtubule velocities as a function of $N_A/N$ from aLENS simulations (blue diamonds) with from the reference experiment (orange circles) (Scharrel et al., 2014). Right panel: displacement vs. time of the transported microtubule obtained from simulation for several values of $N_A/N$. The free walking velocity of active motors was set to $1.0\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{m}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$ to match the experimental sliding velocity at $N_A/N=1$. There are no other fitting parameters. All motor parameters are estimates based on experiments on Kinesin-1 (Scharrel et al., 2014) or similar motor proteins (Cross and McAinsh, 2014).