Rate in Template-directed Polymer Synthesis

TL;DR

This paper introduces the TDS rate, a metric for evaluating the efficiency of template-directed polymer synthesis, balancing speed and accuracy, and analyzes how system conditions influence this trade-off.

Contribution

It proposes the TDS rate as a new measure for synthesis efficiency and applies it to models to study speed-accuracy trade-offs.

Findings

Increasing synthesis speed raises the TDS rate.

Diversified sequences lower the TDS rate.

System conditions affect the speed-accuracy balance.

Abstract

We discuss temporal efficiency of template-directed polymer synthesis, such as DNA replication and transcription, under a given template string. To weigh the synthesis speed and accuracy on the same scale, we propose a template-directed synthesis (TDS) rate, which contains an expression analogous to that for the Shannon entropy. Increasing the synthesis speed accelerates the TDS rate, but the TDS rate is lowered if the produced sequences are diversified. We apply the TDS rate to some production system models and investigate how the balance between the speed and the accuracy is affected by changes in the system conditions.