Fig. 5: Computer simulations of OCR-2 intensity profiles.

a Cartoon depicting the simulations (see “Methods” section) and resulting trajectories (bottom). After reaching steady state (after ~180 s in trajectory bottom left) the positions of the molecules are collected within a time window of 3 s (zoom of trajectory including position histogram, bottom right). b Simulated OCR-2 intensity profiles with the velocities and diffusion coefficients extracted from the analysis of the single-molecule trajectories as input parameters (Fig. 4d and Supplementary Table 1). Left: IFT/diffusion ratios used correspond to the values in Supplementary Table 1. Right: the IFT/diffusion ratio is set to 0, in order to mimic OCR-2 in the bbs-8 mutant background. The number of OCR-2 is constant and each OCR-2 leaving the cilium towards the dendrite is replaced by one entering. Gray lines represent the averaged distributions of OCR-2 over a time laps of 3 s (similar to the experimental data in Fig. 1a), after reaching steady state. Black lines represent the distribution averaged over the complete steady-state regime (between 180 and 390 s (see also trajectories in a; i.e., all gray curves averaged). Cartoon insets indicate that in the simulations the number of OCR-2 was forced to be constant (in time).