Paper detail

Conditional Probability as Found in Nature: Facilitated Diffusion

Transcription Factors (TFs) are proteins that regulate gene expression. The regulation mechanism is via the binding of a TF to a specific part of the gene associated with it, the TF's target. The target of a specific TF corresponds to a vanishingly small part of the entire DNA, where at the same time the search must end in a matter of tens of seconds at most for its biological purpose to be fulfilled - this makes the search a problem of high interest. Facilitated Diffusion is a mechanism used in nature for a robust and efficient search process. This mechanism combines 1D diffusion along the DNA and "excursions" of diffusion in 3D that help the TF to quickly arrive at distant parts of the DNA. In this paper we provide a derivation concerning this mechanism that links this search process to fundamental concepts in probability theory (conditional probability).