DNA binding proteins (DBPs) diffuse in the cytoplasm to recognise and bind with their respective target sites on the DNA to initiate several biologically important processes. The first passage time distributions (FPTDs) of DBPs are useful in quantifying the timescales of the most-probable search paths in addition to the mean value of the distribution which, strikingly, are decades of order apart in time. However, extremely crowded in vivo conditions or the viscoelasticity of the cellular medium among other factors causes biomolecules to exhibit anomalous diffusion which is usually overlooked in most theoretical studies. We have obtained approximate analytical expressions of a general FPTD and the two characteristic timescales that are valid for any single subdiffusing protein searching for its target in vivo. Our results can be applied to single-particle tracking experiments of target search.

中文翻译：

---

通过亚扩散蛋白质对 DNA 目标搜索的完整描述的理论见解

DNA 结合蛋白 (DBP) 在细胞质中扩散，以识别 DNA 上各自的靶位点并与之结合，从而启动几个生物学上重要的过程。DBP 的首次通过时间分布 (FPTD) 除了分布的平均值之外，还可用于量化最可能搜索路径的时间尺度，引人注目的是，分布的平均值在时间上相隔几十年。然而，极度拥挤的体内条件或细胞介质的粘弹性等因素导致生物分子表现出异常扩散，这在大多数理论研究中通常被忽视。我们已经获得了一般 FPTD 的近似解析表达式和两个特征时间尺度，这两个时间尺度对搜索其目标的任何单个亚扩散蛋白有效体内。我们的结果可以应用于目标搜索的单粒子跟踪实验。