Fig. 2: Tug-of-war like motion demonstrated by phagosome.

4D trajectory of phagosome with a time shown in colour, b pitch angle shown in colour, c position of the bead inside cell captured with a bright field microscope. White arrows indicate the direction of to and fro motion. d 2D trajectory in X-Y plane extracted from video tracking. e Time series for X and pitch for tracked with QPD with respective force and torque scale bars. f Corresponding MSD curves for X (blue open circle) and pitch (red open circle). g CCF of X and pitch rotation from experimental data (red curve) and fit to Eq. (5) (black curve). h Broken detailed balance is demonstrated by showing circulating current from the vector plot of the configuration current, see Eq. (8). Using the parameters obtained by fit to the data from (g), we do a vector plot of the configuration current, see Eq. (8), which is overlaid on the pseudo-color plot of the steady-state probability distribution, see Eq. (7). i Oppositely directed teams of motors pulling on a cargo along a cytoskeletal track causes the birefringent cargo to rotate. The optics axis shown as the black solid line indicates the orientation of the birefringent sphere. Right end directed team of motors pulls on it causing it to rotate in clockwise sense (1–2). The other team of motors take over to cause reversal in direction and rotation in anticlockwise direction (2–3 and 3–4).