The impacts of molecular motor traffic jams

Much of a modern person's day is spent trying to get from point A to point B. So, too, in the cell, much time and energy is expended on shuttling organelles, protein complexes, and mRNA, called “cargos,” from point A to point B. We know that vehicle traffic slows down when roads get jammed with high-volume congestion. The traffic analogy begs the question: Do cellular highways get jammed? This is the question being probed by Leduc et al. in PNAS (1).

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