Kinetics of ligand binding to nucleic acids at arbitrary occupancy

Ligand binding to nucleic acids is described in the context of the theory of random processes. It is shown that a probabilistic description of the binding of a ligand to a nucleic acid yields the kinetics of the number of bound ligands at arbitrary occupancy, as well as the steady-state value and the variance. It is demonstrated that a combined analysis of the adsorption isotherm and the kinetics of ligand binding to nucleic acids makes it possible to determine the rate constants for association and dissociation of the ligand-nucleic acid complex. The results obtained are compared with the case of low occupancy.