Force-Velocity Relation for Actin-Polymerization-Driven Motility from Brownian Dynamics Simulations

We report numerical simulation results for the force-velocity relation for actin-polymerization-driven motility. We use Brownian dynamics to solve a physically consistent formulation of the dendritic nucleation model with semiflexible filaments that self-assemble and push a disk. We find that at small loads, the disk speed is independent of load, whereas at high loads, the speed decreases and vanishes at a characteristic stall pressure. Our results demonstrate that at small loads, the velocity is controlled by the reaction rates, whereas at high loads the stall pressure is determined by the mechanical properties of the branched actin network. The behavior is consistent with experiments and with our recently proposed self-diffusiophoretic mechanism for actin-polymerization-driven motility. New in vitro experiments to measure the force-velocity relation are proposed.