Quantitative aspects of a unified model of diffusion mediated receptor--cyclase coupling.
A quantitative model is presented of diffusion mediated coupling of adenylate cyclase to multivalent plasma membrane receptors which accounts for a wide range of phenomena including non linear occupation-activation plots with either positive or negative second derivatives, spare receptors, silent receptors, and negative and positive binding cooperativity. A non linear least square fit of the predicted equation for cyclase activation to available data predicts translational diffusion coefficients in the range of (10(-10) - 10(-11))cm2/s.