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Annwesha Dutta

Publications and source records attributed to Annwesha Dutta.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

Multi-filament coordination rescues active transport from inertia-induced spinning arrest

Active filaments driven by tangential forces can become trapped in a spinning state when attached to a heavy head, where activity and inertia drive persistent rotation rather than directed transport. Using three-dimensional Langevin dynamics of tangentially driven bead-spring chains anchored to a common heavy head, we demonstrate that increasing the filament number $\Nf$ systematically \emph{rescues} directed transport by sterically preventing the coiled conformations that underlie spinning. The rescue is established through three independent diagnostics: (i)~the mean-square displacement recovers monotonic growth (transport rescue), (ii)~the spatial tangent autocorrelation loses its negative dip signaling helical coiling (conformational rescue), and (iii)~the tangent time autocorrelation ceases crossing zero (orientational rescue). At high bending stiffness ($\kb = 1000$), coiling is fully eliminated at a critical filament number $\Nf^* \approx 3$. At moderate stiffness ($\kb = 100$), residual coiling persists ($\min C_s \approx -0.13$) yet transport is still rescued -- demonstrating that the destruction of spinning \emph{coherence}, not coiling elimination, is the essential mechanism. The multi-filament architecture achieves up to five orders of magnitude transport enhancement. Two physically distinct rescue pathways emerge: at high stiffness, steric constraints force filaments into a coordinated bundle sustaining directed propulsion; at low stiffness, steric interactions destroy orientational coherence, producing enhanced active diffusion. These results demonstrate a purely mechanical, density-independent route to overcome inertia-induced motility arrest, with implications for synthetic microswimmer design, motor-driven filament assays, and multi-filament organization in biological systems.

cond-mat.soft↗

Fluctuation Theorem as a special case of Girsanov Theorem

Stochastic thermodynamics is an important development in the direction of finding general thermodynamic principles for non-equilibrium systems. We believe stochastic thermodynamics has the potential to benefit from the measure-theoretic framework of stochastic differential equations. Towards this, in this work, we show that Fluctuation Theorem (FT) is a special case of the Girsanov theorem, which is an important result in the theory of stochastic differential equations. We report that by employing Girsanov transformation of measures between the forward and the reversed dynamics of a general class of Langevin dynamic systems, we arrive at the Integral Fluctuation Relation. Following the same approach, we derive the FT also for the overdamped case. Our derivation is applicable to both transient and steady state conditions and can also incorporate diffusion coefficients varying as a function of state and time. We expect that the proposed method will be an easy route towards deriving the FT irrespective of the complexity and non-linearity of the system.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

What to learn from a few visible transitions' statistics?

Interpreting partial information collected from systems subject to noise is a key problem across scientific disciplines. Theoretical frameworks often focus on the dynamics of variables that result from coarse-graining the internal states of a physical system. However, most experimental apparatuses can only detect a partial set of transitions, while internal states are inaccessible. Here, we consider an observer who records a time series of occurrences of one or several transitions performed by a system, under the assumption that its underlying dynamics is Markovian. We pose the question of how one can use the transitions' information to make inferences of dynamical, thermodynamical, and biochemical properties. First, elaborating on first-passage time techniques, we derive analytical expressions for the probabilities of consecutive transitions and the time elapsed between them. Second, we derive a lower bound for the entropy production rate that equals the sum of two non-negative contributions, one due to the statistics of transitions and a second due to the statistics of inter-transition times. We also show that when only one current is measured, our estimate still detects irreversibility even in the absence of net currents. We illustrate the developed framework in experimentally-validated biophysical models of kinesin and dynein molecular motors, and in a minimal model for template-directed polymerization. Our results reveal that while entropy production is entailed in the statistics of two successive transitions of the same type, the statistics of two different successive transitions can probe the existence of an underlying disorder in the motion of a molecular motor. Taken all together, our results highlight the power of inference from transition statistics ranging from thermodynamic quantities to network-topology properties of Markov processes.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

Stochastic thermodynamics and modes of operation of a ribosome: a network theoretic perspective

The ribosome is one of the largest and most complex macromolecular machines in living cells. It polymerizes a protein in a step-by-step manner as directed by the corresponding nucleotide sequence on the template messenger RNA (mRNA) and this process is referred to as `translation' of the genetic message encoded in the sequence of mRNA transcript. In each successful chemo-mechanical cycle during the (protein) elongation stage, the ribosome elongates the protein by a single subunit, called amino acid, and steps forward on the template mRNA by three nucleotides called a codon. Therefore, a ribosome is also regarded as a molecular motor for which the mRNA serves as the track, its step size is that of a codon and two molecules of GTP and one molecule of ATP hydrolyzed in that cycle serve as its fuel. What adds further complexity is the existence of competing pathways leading to distinct cycles, branched pathways in each cycle and futile consumption of fuel that leads neither to elongation of the nascent protein nor forward stepping of the ribosome on its track. We investigate a model formulated in terms of the network of discrete chemo-mechanical states of a ribosome during the elongation stage of translation. The model is analyzed using a combination of stochastic thermodynamic and kinetic analysis based on a graph-theoretic approach. We derive the exact solution of the corresponding master equations. We represent the steady state in terms of the cycles of the underlying network and discuss the energy transduction processes. We identify the various possible modes of operation of a ribosome in terms of its average velocity and mean rate of GTP hydrolysis. We also compute entropy production as functions of the rates of the interstate transitions and the thermodynamic cost for accuracy of the translation process.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

A Biologically Motivated Asymmetric Exclusion Process: interplay of congestion in RNA polymerase traffic and slippage of nascent transcript

We develope a theoretical framework, based on exclusion process, that is motivated by a biological phenomenon called transcript slippage (TS). In this model a discrete lattice represents a DNA strand while each of the particles that hop on it unidirectionally, from site to site, represents a RNA polymerase (RNAP). While walking like a molecular motor along a DNA track in a step-by-step manner, a RNAP simultaneously synthesizes a RNA chain; in each forward step it elongates the nascent RNA molecule by one unit, using the DNA track also as the template. At some special "slippery" position on the DNA, which we represent as a defect on the lattice, a RNAP can lose its grip on the nascent RNA and the latter's consequent slippage results in a final product that is either longer or shorter than the corresponding DNA template. We develope an exclusion model for RNAP traffic where the kinetics of the system at the defect site captures key features of TS events. We demonstrate the interplay of the crowding of RNAPs and TS. A RNAP has to wait at the defect site for longer period in a more congested RNAP traffic, thereby increasing the likelihood of its suffering a larger number of TS events. The qualitative trends of some of our results for a simple special case of our model are consistent with experimental observations. The general theoretical framework presented here will be useful for guiding future experimental queries and for analysis of the experimental data with more detailed versions of the same model.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

A generalized Michaelis-Menten equation in protein synthesis: effects of mis-charged cognate tRNA and mis-reading of codon

The sequence of amino acid monomers in the primary structure of a protein is decided by the corresponding sequence of codons (triplets of nucleic acid monomers) on the template messenger RNA (mRNA). The polymerization of a protein, by incorporation of the successive amino acid monomers, is carried out by a molecular machine called ribosome. We develop a stochastic kinetic model that captures the possibilities of mis-reading of mRNA codon and prior mis-charging of a tRNA. By a combination of analytical and numerical methods we obtain the distribution of the times taken for incorporation of the successive amino acids in the growing protein in this mathematical model. The corresponding exact analytical expression for the average rate of elongation of a nascent protein is a `biologically motivated' generalization of the {\it Michaelis-Menten formula} for the average rate of enzymatic reactions. This generalized Michaelis-Menten-like formula (and the exact analytical expressions for a few other quantities) that we report here display the interplay of four different branched pathways corresponding to selection of four different types of tRNA.

physics.bio-ph↗