Attached molecular motor in a trapped single molecule assay as a bidimensional Brownian multistable system

To elucidate the physical properties of the force generation mechanism in molecular motors, we have obtained an analytical solution of the bidimensional Fokker-Plank equation which describes a common setup used in single molecule experiments. As a first application of this general result, we have shown that the size of the trapping system affects the dwell time of a multistable particle linearly. A quantitative application to skeletal actomyosin complex, using direct observation of force generation dynamics in the literature, shows that the size of the trapping system used was important for increasing the dwell time of the myosin head stable states to an observable time scale. © 2013 American Physical Society.