  A kinetic theory is developed for exonuclease-deficient DNA polymerases,
based on the experimental observation that the rates depend not only on the
newly incorporated nucleotide, but also on the previous one, leading to the
growth of Markovian DNA sequences from a Bernoullian template. The dependences
on nucleotide concentrations and template sequence are explicitly taken into
account. In this framework, the kinetic and thermodynamic properties of DNA
replication, in particular, the mean growth velocity, the error probability,
and the entropy production in terms of the rate constants and the
concentrations are calculated analytically. Theory is compared with numerical
simulations for the DNA polymerases of T7 viruses and human mitochondria.
