title: Kinetics and thermodynamics of DNA polymerases with exonuclease proofreading.
abstract: Kinetic theory and thermodynamics are applied to DNA polymerases with exonuclease activity, taking into account the dependence of the rates on the previously incorporated nucleotide. The replication fidelity is shown to increase significantly thanks to this dependence at the basis of the mechanism of exonuclease proofreading. In particular, this dependence can provide up to a 100-fold lowering of the error probability under physiological conditions. Theory is compared with numerical simulations for the DNA polymerases of T7 viruses and human mitochondria.
authors.affiliation: Center for Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex Systems, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Code Postal 231, Campus Plaine, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: Pierre
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Gaspard
mesh_terms: D017123:Bacteriophage T7 / Q000201:enzymology; D004259:DNA-Directed DNA Polymerase / Q000378:metabolism*; D005092:Exonucleases / Q000378:metabolism*; D006801:Humans; D007700:Kinetics; D008390:Markov Chains; D008928:Mitochondria / Q000201:enzymology; D008954:Models, Biological; D013816:Thermodynamics
chemical_list: D004259:DNA-Directed DNA Polymerase; D005092:Exonucleases