Exploring resetting-based effects to increase reaction speed in drift-diffusive environments

Chemical reactions, particularly in biological systems, often feature gated processes. These involve conformational changes in one or more of the reactants that determine whether a reaction occurs. Molecules will switch between an open or closed configuration and only react in the open configuration. Many crucial biological mechanisms, such as enzymes linking with substrates, proteins attaching to DNA target sites, and compounds associating to peptide cleavage sites operate using gated processes.

Because gated reactions are common, understanding and manipulating their rates can have widespread theoretical and practical applications in science and medicine. Biswas et al. evaluated the mechanics of one tool to vary the rates of gated reactions, stochastic resetting, on gated transport in a drift-diffusion process.

“Resetting implies a mechanism where an ongoing dynamical process is stopped to start over, and it can significantly affect the mean completion time of the process,” said author Somrita Ray. “Remarkably, we find that an optimal resetting rate can enhance the process completion rate by orders of magnitude.”

In environments with homogeneous diffusion, optimal resetting always speeds up the mean reaction times by truncating longer reaction trajectories. However, resetting can have a variable benefit in the presence of directional drift and can even slow process rates in certain cases. The team developed an analytical model to evaluate the effect of optimal resetting under a wide range of possible conditions.

“The framework developed herein and the findings we report are of broad interest in physics and chemistry as they provide new insights into the fundamentals of improving the rate of gated reactions,” said Ray.

Source: “Rate enhancement of gated drift-diffusion process by optimal resetting,” by Arup Biswas, Arnab Pal, Debasish Mondal, and Somrita Ray, Journal of Chemical Physics (2023). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0154210 .

This paper is part of the 2023 JCP Emerging Investigators Special Collection, learn more here .