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Updated: Mar 14, 2026

Measuring the Kinetics of mRNA Transcription in Single Living Cells
Published on: August 25, 2011
Stochastic Kinetics of Nascent RNA
Heng Xu1, Samuel O Skinner1, Anna Marie Sokac2
1Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA; Center for the Physics of Living Cells, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA; Verna & Marrs McLean Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA.
Abstract:
The stochastic kinetics of transcription is typically inferred from the distribution of RNA numbers in individual cells. However, cellular RNA reflects additional processes downstream of transcription, hampering this analysis. In contrast, nascent (actively transcribed) RNA closely reflects the kinetics of transcription. We present a theoretical model for the stochastic kinetics of nascent RNA, which we solve to obtain the probability distribution of nascent RNA per gene. The model allows us to evaluate the kinetic parameters of transcription from single-cell measurements of nascent RNA. The model also predicts surprising discontinuities in the distribution of nascent RNA, a feature which we verify experimentally.
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