Transient Kinetic Proofreading
Keyword(s):
AbstractWe propose a 2-dimensional Markov chain model to understand and efficiently compute the transient behavior of the kinetic proofreading mechanism in a single T-cell. We show that a stochastic version of absolute ligand discrimination is a direct consequence of the finite number of receptors on the cell surface; thus, pointing to number control as being important for absolute ligand discrimination. We also develop 1-dimensional approximations for several limiting regimes that significantly decrease the computational time. We present results of numerical experiments that explore the behavior of the new model for a wide range of parameters, and its robustness to parameter errors.