Computational Investigations on Polymerase Actions in Gene Transcription and Replication Combining Physical Modeling and Atomistic Simulations

TL;DR

This paper reviews computational approaches, including statistical physics and all-atom molecular dynamics, to understand the mechano-chemical coupling and fidelity mechanisms of polymerases during gene transcription and replication, emphasizing non-equilibrium physical aspects.

Contribution

It provides a focused review of modeling and simulation studies on single-subunit T7 RNA polymerase and recent work on multi-subunit RNA polymerases, highlighting non-equilibrium dynamics and regulatory mechanisms.

Findings

Polymerases act as molecular information motors with complex fluctuation mechanisms.

Non-equilibrium physical modeling is crucial for understanding polymerase function.

Simulation studies reveal detailed insights into elongation pauses and backtracking activities.

Abstract

Polymerases are protein enzymes that move along nucleic acid chains and catalyze template-based polymerization reactions during gene transcription and replication. The polymerases also substantially improve transcription or replication fidelity through the non-equilibrium enzymatic cycles. We briefly review computational efforts that have been made toward understanding mechano-chemical coupling and fidelity control mechanisms of the polymerase elongation. The polymerases are regarded as molecular information motors during the elongation process. It requires a full spectrum of computational approaches from multiple time and length scales to understand the full polymerase functional cycle. We keep away from quantum mechanics based approaches to the polymerase catalysis due to abundant former surveys, while address only statistical physics modeling approach and all-atom molecular dynamics simulation approach. We organize this review around our own modeling and simulation practices on a single-subunit T7 RNA polymerase, and summarize commensurate studies on structurally similar DNA polymerases. For multi-subunit RNA polymerases that have been intensively studied in recent years, we leave detailed discussions on the simulation achievements to other computational chemical surveys, while only introduce very recently published representative studies, including our own preliminary work on structure-based modeling on yeast RNA polymerase II. In the end, we quickly go through kinetic modeling on elongation pauses and backtracking activities. We emphasize the fluctuation and control mechanisms of the polymerase actions, highlight the non-equilibrium physical nature of the system, and try to bring some perspectives toward understanding replication and transcription regulation from single molecular details to a genome-wide scale.