Related papers: Action at a distance in transcriptional regulation
Living cells must control the reading out or "expression" of information encoded in their genomes, and this regulation often is mediated by transcription factors--proteins that bind to DNA and either enhance or repress the expression of…
Gene regulation is one of the most important fundamental biological processes in living cells. It involves multiple protein molecules that locate specific sites on DNA and assemble gene initiation or gene repression multi-molecular…
Proteins often regulate their activities via allostery - or action at a distance - in which the binding of a ligand at one binding site influences the affinity for another ligand at a distal site. Although less studied than in proteins,…
Genes are connected in complex networks of interactions where often the product of one gene is a transcription factor that alters the expression of another. Many of these networks are based on a few fundamental motifs leading to switches…
The most common gene regulation mechanism is when a protein binds to a regulatory sequence to change RNA transcription. However, these sequences are short relative to the genome length, so finding them poses a challenging search problem.…
It is tempting to believe that we now own the genome. The ability to read and re-write it at will has ushered in a stunning period in the history of science. Nonetheless, there is an Achilles heel exposed by all of the genomic data that has…
Gene Regulatory Networks are networks of interactions in biological organisms responsible for determining the production levels of proteins and peptides. Proteins are workers of a cell factory, and their production defines the goal of a…
Gene regulatory networks typically have low in-degrees, whereby any given gene is regulated by few of the genes in the network. What mechanisms might be responsible for these low in-degrees? Starting with an accepted framework of the…
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…
Biomolecular condensates play a crucial role in the spatial organization of living matter. These membrane-less organelles, resulting from liquid-liquid phase separation, operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium, with their size and…
DNA looping participates in transcriptional regulation, for instance, by allowing distal binding sites to act synergistically. Here we study this process and compare different regulatory mechanisms based on repression with and without…
Much of the complexity observed in gene regulation originates from cooperative protein-DNA binding. While studies of the target search of proteins for their specific binding sites on the DNA have revealed design principles for the…
Protein-DNA interactions are vital for many processes in living cells, especially transcriptional regulation and DNA modification. To further our understanding of these important processes on the microscopic level, it is necessary that…
The formation of DNA loops by proteins and protein complexes that bind at distal DNA sites plays a central role in many cellular processes, such as transcription, recombination, and replication. Here we review the basic thermodynamic…
The precision of biochemical signaling is limited by randomness in the diffusive arrival of molecules at their targets. For proteins binding to the specific sites on the DNA and regulating transcription, the ability of the proteins to…
Transcriptional regulation of gene expression is one of the main processes that affect cell diversification from a single set of genes. Regulatory proteins often interact with DNA regions located distally from the transcription start sites…
We revisit the dynamics of a gene repressed by its own protein in the case where the transcription rate does not adapt instantaneously to protein concentration but is a dynamical variable. We derive analytical criteria for the appearance of…
Biomolecular condensates are small droplets forming spontaneously in biological cells via phase separation. They play a role in many cellular processes, but it is unclear how cells control them. Cellular regulation often relies on…
A theory for qualitative models of gene regulatory networks has been developed over several decades, generally considering transcription factors to regulate directly the expression of other transcription factors, without any intermediate…
Cells operate in part by compartmentalizing chemical reactions. For example, recent work has shown that chromatin, the material that contains the cell's genome, can auto-regulate its structure by utilizing reaction products (proteins, RNA)…