Heterogeneities Shape Passive Intracellular Transport (Biophysical Journal)

A living cell`s interior is one of the most complex and intrinsically dynamic systems, providing an elaborate interplay between cytosolic crowding and ATP-driven motion, which controls cellular functionality. Here, we investigated two distinct fundamental features of the merely passive, non-bio-motor shuttled material transport within the cytoplasm of Dictyostelium discoideum cells: the anomalous non-linear scaling of the mean-squared displacement of a 150nm-diameter particle and non-Gaussian distribution of increments.