Interplay of receptor memory and ligand rebinding

Abstract: Rapid rebinding of molecular interaction partners that are in close proximity after dissociation leads to a dissociation and association kinetics that can profoundly differ from predictions based on bulk reaction models. The cause of this effect can be traced back to the non-Markovian character of the ligand's rebinding time probability density function, reflecting the fact that, for a certain time span, the ligand still 'remembers' the receptor it was bound to previously. In this manuscript, we explore the consequences of the hypothesis that initial binding and consecutive rebinding give rise to a bond lifetime density that is non-Markovian as well. We study the combined effect of the two non-Markovian waiting time probability densities and show that even for very short times the decay of the fraction of occupied receptors deviates from an exponential. For long times, dissociation is slower than an exponential and the fate of the the steady-state bound receptor fraction critically depends on the extent of the deviation, relative to the rebinding time density, from the Markovian limit: The population of occupied receptors may either decay completely or assume a non-vanishing value for small and strong deviations, respectively. Furthermore, we point out the important role played by fractional calculus and demonstrate that the short- and long-time dynamics of the occupied receptors can be naturally expressed as well as easily obtained in terms of fractional differential equations involving the Riemann-Liouville derivative. Our analysis shows that cells may exploit receptor memory as mechanism to dynamically widen the range of potential response-patterns to a given signal.