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 Transport in biological Systems

(Nadler)


This work initially grew out of investigations on ligand transport inside proteins. It entails the description of molecular transport in protein matter and cellular compartments by minmalist random walk models. Interestingly, the same class of models can be used to describe macrostate fluctuations due to microscopic conformationial dynamics, like the open-close fluctuations of ion channel proteins. An additional topic is the effective description of observables of these random walks, using the generalized moment expansion and the strong collision approximation of the diffusion operator. Recent results are on the asymptotic behavior of random walks on random partitionings, with applications to ion channel fluctuations, and on a systematic extension of the strong collision approximation and its application to spin dephasing, with interesting applications to the NMR analysis of biological tissues.

Current investigations deal with models for facilitated transport.