Membrane targeting domains play crucial roles in the association of signalling molecules to the plasma membrane. For most peripheral proteins, the protein-to-membrane interaction is transient. After proteins dissociate from the membrane they have bee
n observed to rebind following brief excursions in the bulk solution. Such membrane hops can have broad implications for the efficiency of reactions on membranes. We study the diffusion of membrane-targeting C2 domains using single-molecule tracking in supported lipid bilayers. The ensemble-averaged mean square displacement (MSD) exhibits superdiffusive behaviour. However, traditional time-averaged MSD analysis of individual trajectories remains linear and it does not reveal superdiffusion. Our observations are explained in terms of bulk excursions that introduce jumps with a heavy-tail distribution. These hopping events allow proteins to explore large areas in a short time. The experimental results are shown to be consistent with analytical models of bulk-mediated diffusion and numerical simulations.
The power spectrum of quantum dot fluorescence exhibits $1/f^beta$ noise, related to the intermittency of these nanosystems. As in other systems exhibiting $1/f$ noise, this power spectrum is not integrable at low frequencies, which appears to imply
infinite total power. We report measurements of individual quantum dots that address this long-standing paradox. We find that the level of $1/f^beta$ noise decays with the observation time. The change of the spectrum with time places a bound on the total power. These observations are in stark contrast with most measurements of noise in macroscopic systems which do not exhibit any evidence for non-stationarity. We show that the traditional description of the power spectrum with a single exponent $beta$ is incomplete and three additional critical exponents characterize the dependence on experimental time.
