Abstract
Over the past several decades it has been increasingly recognized that stochastic processes play a central role in transcription. Although many stochastic effects have been explained, the source of transcriptional bursting (one of the most well-known sources of stochasticity) has continued to evade understanding. Recent results have pointed to mechanical feedback as the source of transcriptional bursting, but a reconciliation of this perspective with preexisting views of transcriptional regulation is lacking. In this article, we present a simple phenomenological model that is able to incorporate the traditional view of gene expression within a framework with mechanical limits to transcription. By introducing a simple competition between mechanical arrest and relaxation copy number probability distributions collapse onto a shared universal curve under shifting and rescaling and a lower limit of intrinsic noise for any mean expression level is found.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 13983-13988 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
Volume | 113 |
Issue number | 49 |
Early online date | 22 Nov 2016 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 6 Dec 2016 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Samuel Skinner and Ido Golding for helpful discussions. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (Grant NSF PHY-1308264). H.L. was also supported by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas Scholar program of the State of Texas. D.A.K. was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant 376/12).
Funding
We thank Samuel Skinner and Ido Golding for helpful discussions. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (Grant NSF PHY-1308264). H.L. was also supported by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas Scholar program of the State of Texas. D.A.K. was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant 376/12).
Funders | Funder number |
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National Science Foundation | 1427654 |
Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences | 1308264 |
Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas | |
Center for Theoretical Biological Physics | NSF PHY-1308264 |
Israel Science Foundation | 376/12 |
Keywords
- Bursting noise
- Supercoiling
- Topoisomerase
- Transcription