Dr. John Hughes, assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, is the lead author of a new analysis that seeks to better understand the behavior of processive motor proteins. Processive motor proteins are ATP-powered biological nanomachines that drive many forms of movement in living organisms. By taking “steps” along a microtubule, the motor proteins provide rapid transport of cargoes through the crowded cytoplasm of a cell. Chemical reactions together with a process called tethered diffusion govern the duration and direction of the (random number of) steps taken before the motor dissociates from the microtubule.