Transcriptional control of noise in gene expression
- †Graduate Program in Biophysics and Structural Biology and
- ‡Department of Physics, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454
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Edited by Charles R. Cantor, Sequenom, Inc., San Diego, CA, and approved January 25, 2008 (received for review August 23, 2007)
Abstract
Cis-regulatory control of transcription is the dominant form of regulation of gene expression. Recent experimental results suggest that, in addition to the mean expression level, cell-to-cell variability might also be transcriptionally regulated. Here, we develop a stochastic model of transcriptional regulation that allows us to calculate closed-form analytical expressions for the mean and variance of the protein and mRNA distributions for an arbitrarily complex cis-regulatory motif. Our model allows us to investigate how noise may be transcriptionally regulated independently from the mean expression. We show that our approach is in excellent agreement with stochastic simulations and experiment, and leads to an experimentally testable formula for the noise in gene expression as a function of inducer-molecule concentrations.
Footnotes
- §To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: kondev{at}brandeis.edu
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Author contributions: Á.S. designed research; Á.S. and J.K. performed research; Á.S. analyzed data; and Á.S. and J.K. wrote the paper.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
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This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0707904105/DC1.
- © 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
