Diffusion modifies the connectivity of kinetic schemes for multisite binding and catalysis.

The simplest way to describe the influence of the relative diffusion of the reactants on the time course of bimolecular reactions is to modify or renormalize the phenomenological rate constants that enter into the rate equations of conventional chemical kinetics. However, for macromolecules with multiple inequivalent reactive sites, this is no longer sufficient, even in the low concentration limit. The physical reason is that an enzyme (or a ligand) that has just modified (or dissociated from) one site can bind to a neighboring site rather than diffuse away. This process is not described by the conventional chemical kinetics, which is only valid in the limit that diffusion is fast compared with reaction. Using an exactly solvable many-particle reaction-diffusion model, we show that the influence of diffusion on the kinetics of multisite binding and catalysis can be accounted for by not only scaling the rates, but also by introducing new connections into the kinetic scheme. The rate constants that describe these new transitions or reaction channels turn out to have a transparent physical interpretation: The chemical rates are scaled by the appropriate probabilities that a pair of reactants, which are initially in contact, bind rather than diffuse apart. The theory is illustrated by application to phosphorylation of a multisite substrate.