......................................................................
NJIT Applied Mathematics Colloquium
Friday, October 8th 2010, 11:30am
Cullimore Lecture Hall II
New Jersey Institute of Technology
......................................................................
A look-ahead model for the transcriptional dynamics of RNA polymerase
NYU
The look-ahead model for the transcriptional dynamics of RNA polymerase postulates that there is a window of activity (a subset of the transcription bubble formed by RNA polymerase as it separates the two strands of DNA) within which ribonucleoside triphosphates (rNTP) may be reversibly bound to the template strand of the DNA before being covalently linked to the nascent RNA chain. If the window of activity is large enough to accomodate more than one basepair, then a kind of parallel processing is possible, in which the different rNTP can be selected in advance and held in readiness until they are needed, thus enabling faster synthesis of RNA. In this talk, we derive the statistical distribution of the waiting times between forward moves of the RNA polymerase molecule, and compare these theoretical results to experimental data. The implications of look-ahead for the error rate of transcription will also be discussed. (Joint work with Y. Richard Yamada.)
Last Modified: Oct 2010
Linda Cummings
L i n d a . J . C u m m i n g s @ n j i t . e d u