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First Passage Properties of Molecular Spiders

Molecular spiders are synthetic catalytic DNA-based nanoscale walkers. We study the mean first passage time for abstract models of spiders moving on a finite two-dimensional lattice with various boundary conditions, and compare it with the mean first passage time of spiders moving on a one-dimensional track. We evaluate by how much the slowdown on newly visited sites, owing to catalysis, can improve the mean first passage time of spiders and show that in one dimension, when both ends of the track are an absorbing boundary, the performance gain is lower than in two dimensions, when the absorbing boundary is a circle; this persists even when the absorbing boundary is a single site.