An Accurate and Stable Filtered Explicit Scheme for Biopolymerization Processes in the Presence of Perturbations

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the development, numerical simulation and parameter analysis of a model of the transcription of ribosomal RNA in highly transcribed genes. Inspired by the well-known classic Lighthill-Whitham-Richards (LWR) traffic flow model, a linear advection continuum model is used to describe the DNA transcription process. In this model, elongation velocity is assumed to be essentially constant as RNA polymerases move along the strand through different phases of gene transcription. One advantage of using the linear model is that it allows one to quantify how small perturbations in elongation velocity and inflow parameters affect important biology measures such as Average Transcription Time (ATT) for the gene. The ATT per polymerase is the amount of time an individual RNAP spends traveling through the DNA strand. The numerical treatment for model simulations includes introducing a low complexity and time accurate method by adding a simple linear time filter to the classic upwind scheme. This improved method is modular and requires a minimal modification of adding only one line of code resulting in increased accuracy without increased computational expense. In addition, it removes the overdamping of upwind. A stability condition for the new algorithm is derived, and numerical computations illustrate stability and convergence of the filtered scheme as well as improved ATT estimation.