Related papers: Temporal precision of regulated gene expression
Cellular behaviors such as migration, division, and differentiation rely on precise timing, and yet the molecular events that govern these behaviors are highly stochastic. We investigate regulatory strategies that decrease the timing noise…
An important occurrence in many cellular contexts is the crossing of a prescribed threshold by a regulatory protein. The timing of such events is stochastic as a consequence of the innate randomness in gene expression. A question of…
Timing is essential for many cellular processes, from cellular responses to external stimuli to the cell cycle and circadian clocks. Many of these processes are based on gene expression. For example, an activated gene may be required to…
Multiple cellular processes are triggered when the concentration of a regulatory protein reaches a critical threshold. Previous analyses have characterized timing statistics for single-gene systems. However, many biological timers are based…
It often is emphasized that gene expression is noisy. A seemingly contradictory view is that control mechanisms have been optimized to squeeze as much information as possible out of a limited number of molecules. Here we revisit these…
The processes of gene expression are inherently stochastic, even for essential genes required for growth. How does the cell maximize fitness in light of noise? To answer this question, we build a mathematical model to explore the trade-off…
Quantitative single cell measurements have shown that cell cycle duration (the time between cell divisions) for diverse cell types is a noisy variable. The underlying distribution is mean scalable with a universal shape for many cell types…
Intracellular transmission of information via chemical and transcriptional networks is thwarted by a physical limitation: the finite copy number of the constituent chemical species introduces unavoidable intrinsic noise. Here we provide a…
Biological rhythms are generated by pacemaker organs, such as the heart pacemaker organ (the sinoatrial node) and the master clock of the circadian rhythms (the suprachiasmatic nucleus), which are composed of a network of autonomously…
In order to survive, reproduce and (in multicellular organisms) differentiate, cells must control the concentrations of the myriad different proteins that are encoded in the genome. The precision of this control is limited by the inevitable…
One major challenge for living cells is the measurement and prediction of signals corrupted by noise. In general, cells need to make decisions based on their compressed representation of noisy, time-varying signals. Strategies for signal…
For navigation, microscopic agents such as biological cells rely on noisy sensory input. In cells performing chemotaxis, such noise arises from the stochastic binding of signaling molecules at low concentrations. Using chemotaxis of sperm…
Many cellular functions are based on the rhythmic organization of biological processes into self-repeating cascades of events. Some of these periodic processes, such as the cell cycles of several species, exhibit conspicuous irregularities…
Cells control their size to cope with noise during growth and division. Eukaryotic cells exhibiting "sizer" control (targeting a specific size before dividing) may rely on molecular concentration thresholds, but simple implementations of…
Cells employ control strategies to maintain a stable size. Dividing at a target size (the `sizer' strategy) is thought to produce the tightest size distribution. However, this result follows from phenomenological models that ignore the…
Recently we have shown a system developed to precisely control the laser pulse timing of excimer lasers [1]. The electronic circuit based on an embedded microcontroller and utilized the natural jitter noise of the laser pulse generation to…
Gene expression is inherently noisy, posing a challenge to understanding how precise and reproducible patterns of gene expression emerge in mammals. We investigate this phenomenon using gastruloids, an in vitro model for early mammalian…
Based on a non-equilibrium mechanism for spatial pattern formation we study how position information can be controlled by locally coupled discrete dynamical networks, similar to gene regulation networks of cells in a developing…
Precise temporal coordination of gene expression is crucial for many developmental processes. One central question in developmental biology is how such coordinated expression patterns are robustly controlled. During embryonic development of…
Engineering biology requires precise control of biomolecular circuits, and Cybergenetics is the field dedicated to achieving this goal. A significant challenge in developing controllers for cellular functions is designing systems that can…