Abstract: The theory of diffusion-influenced reactions is extended to cases where the reactivity of the species fluctuates in time (e.g., the accessibility of a binding site of a protein is modulated by a gate). The opening and closing of the gate is assumed to be a stationary Markov process [i.e., it is described by the kinetic scheme (open) a⇄b (closed)]. When the reaction is described by suitable boundary conditions, by solving the appropriate reaction-diffusion equations, it is shown that the stochastically gated association rate constant (kSG) is ...
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