Mean first-passage time in the steady-state kinetics of biochemical processes

The Hill's technique of summing up the directional diagrams has been developed in order to calculate the steady-state operational fluxes for a single and two coupled enzymatic reactions controlled and gated by the arbitrary type stochastic dynamics of conformational transitions of the protein enzyme involved. It is shown that these fluxes cannot be described in terms of the complete rate constants of the component reactions but, separately, by the equilibrium (transition state theory) contributions to the rate constants and the mean first-passage times between the succeeding gates. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.