Growth and dissolution of macromolecular Markov chains

Abstract

The kinetics and thermodynamics of free living copolymerization are studied for processes with rates depending on k monomeric units of the macromolecular chain behind the unit that is attached or detached. In this case, the sequence of monomeric units in the growing copolymer is a kth-order Markov chain. In the regime of steady growth, the statistical properties of the sequence are determined analytically in terms of the attachment and detachment rates. In this way, the mean growth velocity as well as the thermodynamic entropy production and the sequence disorder can be calculated systematically. These different properties are also investigated in the regime of depolymerization where the macromolecular chain is dissolved by the surrounding solution. In this regime, the entropy production is shown to satisfy Landauer's principle.

References in corpus (3)

• The large deviation approach to statistical mechanics
• Kinetics and thermodynamics of first-order Markov chain copolymerization
• A general theory of kinetics and thermodynamics of steady-state copolymerization

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Fundamental costs in the production and destruction of persistent polymer copies
• The template-specific fidelity of DNA replication with high-order neighbor effects: a first-passage approach
• Template-directed growth of copolymers
• Multistate reversible copolymerization of nonMarkovian chains under low conversion conditions
• Kinetic discrimination of a polymerase in the presence of obstacles