Rate in template-directed polymer synthesis.

We discuss the temporal efficiency of template-directed polymer synthesis, such as DNA replication and transcription, under a given template string. To weigh the synthesis speed and accuracy on the same scale, we propose a template-directed synthesis (TDS) rate, which contains an expression analogous to that for the Shannon entropy. Increasing the synthesis speed accelerates the TDS rate, but the TDS rate is lowered if the produced sequences are diversified. We apply the TDS rate to some production system models and investigate how the balance between the speed and the accuracy is affected by changes in the system conditions.