Kinetics of ligand binding to nucleic acids.

Ligand binding to nucleic acids (NA) is considered as a stationary Markov process. It is shown that the probabilistic description of ligand-NA binding allows one to describe not only the kinetics of the change of number of bound ligands at arbitrary fillings but also to calculate stationary values of the number of bound ligands and its dispersion. The general analysis of absorption isotherms and kinetics of ligand binding to NA make it possible to determine of rate constants of ligand-NA complex formation and dissociation.