Mechanical bounds to transcriptional noise

Stuart A. Sevier, David A. Kessler, Herbert Levine

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

24 Scopus citations

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 languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)13983-13988
Number of pages6
JournalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume113
Issue number49
Early online date22 Nov 2016
DOIs
StatePublished - 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).

FundersFunder number
National Science Foundation1427654
Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences1308264
Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas
Center for Theoretical Biological PhysicsNSF PHY-1308264
Israel Science Foundation376/12

    Keywords

    • Bursting noise
    • Supercoiling
    • Topoisomerase
    • Transcription

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