Figure 2.

Differences in single-step and multi-step elongation processes. Simulating the elongation of RNA polymerase along 50 based of DNA as a one-step elongation process versus a chain of individual elongation events gives the same average elongation time, but produces marked differences in the distribution of those elongation times. The process shown here is either a single 1.0 second elongation step (red) or fifty 0.02 second elongation steps (blue). Each histogram is the distribution of resulting times from 20,000 independent simulations.