Related papers: Efficient Degradation and Expression Prioritizatio…
MicroRNAs are endogenous non-coding RNAs which negatively regulate the expression of protein-coding genes in plants and animals. They are known to play an important role in several biological processes and, together with transcription…
MicroRNAs are small non-coding nucleotide sequences that regulate target protein expression at post-transcriptional levels. Biogenesis of microRNA is a highly regulated multi-step pathway. Regulation of miRNA biogenesis can be caused…
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…
RNA interference (RNAi) is a mechanism whereby small RNAs (siRNAs) directly control gene expression without assistance from proteins. This mechanism consists of interactions between RNAs and small RNAs both of which may be single or double…
Small interfering RNA (siRNA) is a short double-stranded RNA molecule (about 21-23 nucleotides) with the potential to cure diseases by silencing the function of target genes. Due to its well-understood mechanism, many siRNA-based drugs have…
Motivated by recent experimental work, we define and study a deterministic model of the complex miRNA-based regulatory circuit that putatively controls the early stage of myogenesis in human. We aim in particular at a quantitative…
Down regulation of mRNA translation is an important problem in various bio-medical domains ranging from developing effective medicines for tumors and for viral diseases to developing attenuated virus strains that can be used for…
Cells integrate signals and make decisions about their future state in short amounts of time. A lot of theoretical effort has gone into asking how to best design gene regulatory circuits that fulfill a given function, yet little is known…
We show that biological networks with serial regulation (each node regulated by at most one other node) are constrained to {\it direct functionality}, in which the sign of the effect of an environmental input on a target species depends…
Recent work on synthetic rescues has shown that the targeted deletion of specific metabolic genes can often be used to rescue otherwise non-viable mutants. This raises a fundamental biophysical question: to what extent can the whole-cell…
This paper analyzes, in the context of a prokaryotic cell, the stochastic variability of the number of proteins when there is a control of gene expression by an autoregulation scheme. The goal of this work is to estimate the efficiency of…
We study genetic networks that produce many species of non-coding RNA molecules that are present at a moderate density, as typically exists in the cell. The associations of the many species of these RNA are modeled physically, taking into…
It has recently been suggested that the competition for a finite pool of microRNAs (miRNA) gives rise to effective interactions among their common targets (competing endogenous RNAs or ceRNAs) that could prove to be crucial for…
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that function as regulators of gene expression. In recent years, there has been a tremendous and growing interest among researchers to investigate the role of miRNAs in normal cellular as well as…
A feed-forward loop (FFL) is a common gene-regulatory motif in which usually the upstream regulator is a protein, a transcription factor, that regulates the expression of the target protein in two parallel pathways. Here, we study a…
In bacteria such as $\textit{Escherichia coli}$, DNA is compacted into a nucleoid near the cell center, while ribosomes$-$molecular complexes that translate messenger RNAs (mRNAs) into proteins$-$are mainly localized at the poles. We study…
Central to the functioning of a living cell is its ability to control the readout or expression of information encoded in the genome. In many cases, a single transcription factor protein activates or represses the expression of many genes.…
Despite growth being fundamental to all aspects of cell biology, we do not yet know its organizing principles in eukaryotic cells. Classic models derived from the bacteria E. coli posit that protein-synthesis rates are set by mass-action…
Understanding the patterns and causes of phenotypic divergence is a central goal in evolutionary biology. Much work has shown that mRNA abundance is highly variable between closely related species. However, the extent and mechanisms of…
RNA velocity is an important model that combines cellular spliced and unspliced RNA counts to infer dynamical properties of various regulatory functions. Despite its wide applicability and many variants used in practice, the model has not…