Redundancy, extreme statistics and geometrical optics of Brownian motion. Comment on "Redundancy principle and the role of extreme statistics in molecular and cellular biology" by Z. Schuss et al.
Abstract
The authors of [1] promote the idea that many diffusion-limited reaction processes in molecular and cellular biology are determined by extreme effects. That is, the reaction kinetics is controlled not by the typical time for a reactant to reach a reaction site, but rather, by the time for the first of many particles to arrive. If the number of reactants is very large, there can be a profound difference between the typical arrival time and the first arrival time. As argued in [1], this difference has striking implications for the kinetics of a wide variety of diffusion-limited reactions.
- Publication:
-
Physics of Life Reviews
- Pub Date:
- March 2019
- DOI:
- 10.1016/j.plrev.2019.01.020
- Bibcode:
- 2019PhLRv..28...80R