kinetics of the newly proposed pathway in combination with the molecular pathways already referred to. At first glance, *body evaporation and addition* pathway looks similar to *end evaporation and addition*, and naively one would perhaps presume that a simple renormalisation of the rate constants can account for the former. However, a closer look at the problem reveals that for *end evaporation and addition* every polymer has only two ends, resulting into a probability of addition or removal of monomer at the ends that plausibly is independent of the length of the polymer. In contrast, in the case of *body evaporation and addition* the probability of adding or removing a monomer is proportional to the number of bonds in a polymer in which a monomer is being added. Hence, the addition or removal of a monomer along the polymer backbone in the *body evaporation and addition* depends on the size of that particular polymer. As the size of an individual polymer changes as a function of time, it is not possible to simply renormalise the rate constants associated with *body evaporation and addition* pathway and expect it to behave like *end evaporation and addition*.

To study the kinetics of linear self-assembly 