Noise suppression in auto-regulatory gene networks

— Living cells are characterized by small populations of key molecular components that have large stochastic noise associated with them. Various gene network motifs exists within cells that help reduce these stochastic fluctuations. A common such motif is an auto-regulatory gene network where the protein expressed from the gene inhibits its own transcription. Here the transcription rate of the gene is given as some function of the number of protein molecules present in the cell. We refer to this function as the transcriptional response of the gene network. We develop analytical formulas that relate the stochastic fluctuations in protein numbers with the functional form of the transcriptional response. This is done by first approximating the transcriptional response as a polynomial and then using recently developed moment closure techniques to solve for the statistical moments of the protein population. We show that the protein noise level in these auto-regulatory gene networks is ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CDC
• Authors: Abhyudai Singh, João Pedro Hespanha
• Keywords: CDC 2008, Control Systems, Gene Networks, Protein, Transcriptional Responses