Nucleation and growth in one dimension, part II: Application to DNA replication kinetics

TL;DR

This paper adapts a one-dimensional nucleation-and-growth model to analyze DNA replication kinetics, providing methods to extract key parameters from experimental data while addressing common experimental challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for applying nucleation-and-growth models to DNA replication, including guidelines for experimental design and data analysis.

Findings

Evaluation of effects of inhomogeneity, noise, and finite size on measurements

Guidelines for designing experiments to accurately extract I(t) and v

Application of the model to DNA replication data

Abstract

Inspired by recent experiments on DNA replication, we apply a one-dimensional nucleation-and-growth model to DNA-replication kinetics, focusing on how to extract the time-dependent nucleation rate I(t) and growth speed v from data. We discuss generic experimental problems, namely spatial inhomogeneity, measurement noise, and finite-size effects. After evaluating how each of these affects the measurements of I(t) and v, we give guidelines for the design of experiments. These ideas are then discussed in the context of the DNA-replication experiments.