Stochasticity of Intracellular Transport

This talk will describe quantitative analyses of particle tracking data for 
systems with cytoskeletally associated motors to better understand the 
motions contributing to intracellular transport and, more generally, means 
for characterizing systems far from equilibrium. We exploit stochastic properties 
of single particle trajectories to establish "sanity" tests for experimentally 
collected data. Development of simple order parameters for 2d motion 
and studying its behavior for different models of transport in disordered media 
permits us to distinguish between random motion inside dense physical systems 
and molecular motors mediated transport. Furthermore, the stochastic properties 
of insulin-containg vesicles transport in beta cells provide a simple mechanism for how 
important beta cell functioning (biphasic insulin secretion) can arise.