@misc{PulkkinenMetzler2015,
  author    = {Pulkkinen, Otto and Metzler, Ralf},
  title     = {Variance-corrected Michaelis-Menten equation predicts transient rates of single-enzyme reactions and response times in bacterial gene-regulation},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-86632},
  year      = {2015},
  abstract  = {Many chemical reactions in biological cells occur at very low concentrations of constituent molecules. Thus, transcriptional gene-regulation is often controlled by poorly expressed transcription-factors, such as E.coli lac repressor with few tens of copies. Here we study the effects of inherent concentration fluctuations of substrate-molecules on the seminal Michaelis-Menten scheme of biochemical reactions. We present a universal correction to the Michaelis-Menten equation for the reaction-rates. The relevance and validity of this correction for enzymatic reactions and intracellular gene-regulation is demonstrated. Our analytical theory and simulation results confirm that the proposed variance-corrected Michaelis-Menten equation predicts the rate of reactions with remarkable accuracy even in the presence of large non-equilibrium concentration fluctuations. The major advantage of our approach is that it involves only the mean and variance of the substrate-molecule concentration. Our theory is therefore accessible to experiments and not specific to the exact source of the concentration fluctuations.},
  language  = {en}
}