Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-biological-physics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2015/1/a/solution

The messenger RNA has steady state . Since biological translation produces proteins at rate , setting the protein degradation rate equal to this production rate gives
The translational burst size is the expected number of proteins made during one messenger RNA lifetime, whose expected value is . It is dimensionless, rather than a production rate. With independent Poisson process translation and an exponential distribution for the lifetime, the resulting count has a geometric distribution on nonnegative integers with expected value and variance .

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