Paper published in Physical Review E (zero-order ultraspecificity)

The paper “Balancing specificity, sensitivity, and speed of ligand discrimination by zero-order ultraspecificity” was published in Physical Review E 96, 012405 (2017). doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.96.012405

To distinguish target ligands from many structurally similar nontarget ligands, cells must amplify small differences in affinity. In multistep kinetic proofreading, higher specificity comes at the cost of sensitivity and speed. We showed that combining kinetic proofreading with amplification by saturated zero-order reactions (zero-order ultraspecificity) balances specificity, sensitivity, and speed with few steps. An extension of the model also adds insensitivity to large amounts of nontarget ligands.

The work is also described on the Research page.