Balanced Branching in Transcription Termination
K. J. Harrington, R. B. Laughlin, S. Liang
Abstract
The theory of stochastic transcription termination based on free-energy competition requires two or more reaction rates to be delicately balanced over a wide range of physical conditions. A large body of work on glasses and large molecules suggests that this should be impossible in such a large system in the absence of a new organizing principle of matter. We review the experimental literature of termination and find no evidence for such a principle but many troubling inconsistencies, most notably anomalous memory effects. These suggest that termination has a deterministic component and may conceivably be not stochastic at all. We find that a key experiment by Wilson and von Hippel allegedly refuting deterministic termination was an incorrectly analyzed regulatory effect of Mg2+ binding.
Create a lesson
Related papers
The Motile-Units model: Interacting spins model of cell polarization and motility
Jonathan E. Ron, Nir S. Gov
Limits of Inferring Parametric Response from Single-Condition Trajectories inStochastic Reaction Networks
Quentin Thommen
Multiflagellarity facilitates bacterial upstream motility
Ran Tao, Nathaniel C. Esteves, Wanho Lee et al.
Protein eXplosion Imaging (PXI): Protein Structures from Laser-Driven Explosions
Alfredo Bellisario, Tomas André, Carl Caleman et al.
Multiscale retinal flow on a spherical cap of varying aperture
Chang Lin, Zilong Song, Bob Eisenberg et al.
Double-well potentials and crucial estimations in nonlinear dynamics of microtubules
Rama Gupta, Nicolina Pop, Dragana Ranković et al.