Transcriptional leakage versus noise: A simple mechanism of conversion between binary and graded response in autoregulated genes

Abstract

We study the response of an autoregulated gene to a range of concentrations of signal molecules. We show that transcriptional leakage and noise due to translational bursting have the opposite effects. In a positively autoregulated gene, increasing the noise converts the response from graded to binary, while increasing the leakage converts the response from binary to graded. Our findings support the hypothesis that, being a common phenomenon, leaky expression may be a relatively easy way for evolutionary tuning of the type of gene response without changing the type of regulation from positive to negative.

arXiv comment8 pages, 6 figures, published in Physical Review E, http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.91.012704 , copyright APS. Added missing explanations of the symbols in Tab. 1. Corrected "inactive", "active" in the text. Added missing "transcriptional" in the abstract

References in corpus (3)

• Analytical distributions for stochastic gene expression
• Molecular Distributions in Gene Regulatory Dynamics
• Stochastic single-gene auto-regulation

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Influence of gene copy number on self-regulated gene expression
• The Limiting Dynamics of a Bistable Molecular Switch With and Without Noise
• Quantitative Analysis of a Transient Dynamics of a Gene Regulatory Network
• Exponential equilibration of genetic circuits using entropy methods
• The origin of the Poisson distribution in stochastic dynamics of gene expression
• Gene expression noise is affected differentially by feedback in burst frequency and burst size