Biology:Discrete nanoscale transport

Discrete Nanoscale Transport refers to a class of transport phenomena inside cells. The word “nanoscale” refers to the nano-morphological features of the discrete entities being transported and their relevant interactions, whose length scale is from a few to several hundreds nanometers. This distinguishes nanoscale transport from transport of molecular-scale entities such as ions, solutes, metabolites, lipids, proteins, etc.

Transport of nanoscale entities is determined not only by thermal mobility, but also by their interactions with cellular structures (e.g. cytoskeletal filaments), with molecular-scale entities (e.g. motor proteins, signaling molecules), and with other nanoscale entities. In most cases, due to the discrete nature of the transport events and their strong dependence on the local structural and architectural properties of the media, it cannot be described by continuum approaches that are routinely used to describe macroscale transport.