Figure 4

Comparison of TABASCO to species-level simulations for a simple gene. We simulated the expression of a 1,000 amino acid protein using Tabasco (blue), and a standard species-level simulator (red) in which the processes of elongation (transcription and translation) were lumped into single steps. While the steady-state averages and standard deviations (a, b) are statistically equivalent, the pre-steady state kinetics (c) are quite different. Production of the first protein product (d) is much faster in the standard species-level simulator than in Tabasco. In fact, the species-level simulator generates unrealistic times to first production of a a protein; elongation of the polymerase alone should take ~75 seconds for a gene of this size (see text). The data shown are averages of 500 individual simulations.