Self-regulation of the nuclear pore complex enables clogging-free crowded transport

Nuclear pore complexes (NPCs) are the main conduits for macromolecular transport into and out of the nucleus of eukaryotic cells. The central component of the NPC transport mechanism is an assembly of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) that fills the NPC channel. The channel interior is further crowded by large numbers of simultaneously translocating cargo-carrying and free transport proteins. How the NPC can efficiently, rapidly and selectively transport varied cargoes in such crowded conditions remains ill understood. Past experimental results suggest that the NPC is surprisingly resistant to clogging and that transport may even become faster and more efficient as the concentration of transport protein increases. To understand the mechanisms behind these puzzling observations, we construct a computational model of the NPC comprising only a minimal set of commonly-accepted consensus features. This model qualitatively reproduces the previous experimental results and identifies self-regulating mechanisms that relieve crowding. We show that some of the crowding-alleviating mechanisms - such as preventing saturation of the bulk flux - are "robust" and rely on very general properties of crowded dynamics in confined channels, pertaining to a broad class of selective transport nanopores. By contrast, the counter-intuitive ability of the NPC to leverage crowding to achieve more efficient single molecule translocation is "fine-tuned" and relies on the particular spatial architecture of the IDP assembly in the NPC channel.