Skip to main content
. 2021 May 18;49(3):1121–1132. doi: 10.1042/BST20200709

Figure 1. Classical search strategies.

Figure 1.

(A) Diffusion limited search. Shown is the Smoluchowski relationship for diffusion limited reactions, where τsearch is the time taken by a TF to find a target site, V is the size of the explored volume, a is the target site (typically assumed as the size of a nucleotide, since the TF needs to align to its target with base-pair precision and D is the diffusion coefficient of the molecule). Typical expected values for these paramters are provided in the table. (B) The mechanism of facilitated diffusion speed-up the search process, with an efficiency that depends on the fraction of time the TF spend sliding on DNA.