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Confining Domains Lead to Reaction Bursts: Reaction Kinetics in the Plasma Membrane

Figure 2

Total number of reactions, and local reaction rate as a function of time.

a. Total number of reactions involving the tracer molecule as a function of time, obtained by Monte Carlo simulations. In all plots, black data points correspond to no activity and colored data points indicate reaction events. Different colors correspond to different confinement strengths such that (red), (cyan), (green), and 0.25(blue) which represents the case of no confinement. The values of other parameters are: , i.e. reactions are diffusion limited, , , , and there are 10 molecules in the lattice such that . The main figure shows short samples of the simulation data, covering reaction events for each case, and is plotted with an arbitrary offset for visual clarity. The inset shows full data sets for single runs on logarithmic axes. b. local reaction rate as a function of time for strong confinement (red), and for no confinement 0.25(blue). All parameter values are the same as in a. When confinement is strong, the local reaction rate exhibits bursts during which its amplitude is abruptly increased, that are followed by silent periods, or gaps. See the text for the details of how local rate is calculated. In b, simulation steps.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0032948.g002