Modeling Translation in Protein Synthesis with TASEP: A Tutorial and Recent Developments

TL;DR

This paper provides a tutorial on modeling protein synthesis using TASEP, highlighting recent advances in understanding resource limitations and estimating protein production rates with realistic gene parameters.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive tutorial and summarizes new results on resource constraints and current estimation in inhomogeneous TASEP models for protein synthesis.

Findings

Resource limitations affect protein production rates.

Estimates for current in inhomogeneous TASEP models.

Tutorial integrating biological and mathematical aspects.

Abstract

The phenomenon of protein synthesis has been modeled in terms of totally asymmetric simple exclusion processes (TASEP) since 1968. In this article, we provide a tutorial of the biological and mathematical aspects of this approach. We also summarize several new results, concerned with limited resources in the cell and simple estimates for the current (protein production rate) of a TASEP with inhomogeneous hopping rates, reflecting the characteristics of real genes.