What is the error rate of RNA transcription?

The error rate of RNA synthesis is of the order of one mistake per 10^4 or 10^5 nucleotides, about 10^5 times as high as that of DNA synthesis. The much lower fidelity of RNA synthesis can be tolerated because mistakes are not transmitted to progeny. read more

The study of transcription error rates is no exception with recent RNA-Seq experiments making it possible to simply read out the transcriptional errors directly, though these measurements are fraught with challenges since sequencing error rates are comparable to the transcriptional error rates (10-4-10-5) that are being measured. read more

Transcription of RNA in E. coli of both mRNA and the stable rRNA and tRNA, is carried out by ≈1000-10,000 RNA polymerase molecules (BNID 101440) proceeding at a maximal speed of about 40-80 nt/sec as shown in Table 1 (BNID 104900, 104902, 108488). read more