Chipot, Michel; Kinderlehrer, David; Kowalczyk, Michal A variational principle for molecular motors. (English) Zbl 1032.92005 Meccanica 38, No. 5, 505-518 (2003). Summary: Intracellular transport in eukarya is attributed to motor proteins that transduce chemical energy into directed mechanical energy. These nanoscale size motors carry organelles and other cargo on microtubles, are active in mitosis, and play roles in other functions. They function in a highly viscous setting with overdamped dynamics and are in configurations far from conventional notions of equilibrium. We derive a dissipation principle that describes transport in a typical motor system that establishes a weak topology as the natural environment for the system and also yields the equations of evolution. Cited in 1 ReviewCited in 12 Documents MSC: 92C05 Biophysics 92C37 Cell biology 60J70 Applications of Brownian motions and diffusion theory (population genetics, absorption problems, etc.) Keywords:Diffusion mediated transport; Brownian motors; Molecular motors; Dissipation principle; Fokker-Planck equations; Kantorovich-Wasserstein metric; Monge-Kantorovich problem PDFBibTeX XMLCite \textit{M. Chipot} et al., Meccanica 38, No. 5, 505--518 (2003; Zbl 1032.92005) Full Text: DOI