  Fundamental biological processes such as transcription and translation, where
a genetic sequence is sequentially read by a macromolecule, have been well
described by a classical model of non-equilibrium statistical physics, the
totally asymmetric exclusion principle (TASEP). This model describes particles
hopping between sites of a one-dimensional lattice, with the particle current
determining the transcription or translation rate. An open problem is how to
analyze a TASEP where particles can pause randomly, as has been observed during
transcription. In this work, we report that surprisingly, a simple mean-field
model predicts well the particle current for all values of the average pause
duration, using a simple description of blocking behind paused particles.
