Related papers: Positive Feedback, Stochasticity and Genetic Compe…

Structural and dynamical fingerprints of evolutionary optimization in biological networks are still unclear. We here analyze the dynamics of genetic regulatory networks responsible for the regulation of cell cycle and cell differentiation…

A common model of stochastic auto-regulatory gene expression describes promoter switching via cooperative protein binding, effective protein production in the active state and dilution of proteins. Here we consider an extension of this…

In the last years, tens of thousands gene expression profiles for cells of several organisms have been monitored. Gene expression is a complex transcriptional process where mRNA molecules are translated into proteins, which control most of…

Bacterial chemotaxis in Escherichia coli is a canonical system for the study of signal transduction. A remarkable feature of this system is the coexistence of precise adaptation in population with large fluctuating cellular behavior in…

The expression of genes usually follows a two-step procedure. First, a gene (encoded in the genome) is transcribed resulting in a strand of (messenger) RNA. Afterwards, the RNA is translated into protein. Classically, this gene expression…

Selective control in a population is the ability to control a member of the population while leaving the other members relatively unaffected. The concept of selective control is developed using cell death or apoptosis in heterogeneous cell…

The intrinsic stochasticity of gene expression can give rise to large fluctuations and rare events that drive phenotypic variation in a population of genetically identical cells. Characterizing the fluctuations that give rise to such rare…

A common survival strategy of microorganisms subjected to stress involves the generation of phenotypic heterogeneity in the isogenic microbial population enabling a subset of the population to survive under stress. In a recent study, a…

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…

We consider a model of mRNA production governed by the dynamics of a gene that exists in three possible states -- inactive, poised and active. The transitions between the adjacent states are controlled by stochastic processes characterized…

Bistability is ubiquitous in biological systems. For example, bistability is found in many reaction networks that involve the control and execution of important biological functions, such as signalling processes. Positive feedback loops,…

Stem cells can precisely and robustly undergo cellular differentiation and lineage commitment, referred to as stemness. However, how the gene network underlying stemness regulation reliably specifies cell fates is not well understood. To…

The proper functioning of multicellular organisms requires the robust establishment of precise proportions between distinct cell-types. This developmental differentiation process typically involves intracellular regulatory and stochastic…

The Eigen model is a prototypical toy model of evolution that is synonymous with the so-called error catastrophe: when mutation rates are sufficiently high, the genetic variant with the largest replication rate does not occupy the largest…

Gene expression is a stochastic process in which cells produce biomolecules essential to the function of life. Modern experimental methods allow for the measurement of biomolecules at single-cell and single-molecule resolution over time.…

Gene expression is inherently a noisy process which manifests as cell-to-cell variability in time evolution of proteins. Consequently, events that trigger at critical threshold levels of regulatory proteins exhibit stochasticity in their…

Gene regulatory circuits must contend with intrinsic noise that arises due to finite numbers of proteins. While some circuits act to reduce this noise, others appear to exploit it. A striking example is the competence circuit in Bacillus…

Genetic switch systems with mutual repression of two transcription factors are studied using deterministic and stochastic methods. Numerous studies have concluded that cooperative binding is a necessary condition for the emergence of…

The phenomena of stochasticity in biochemical processes have been intriguing life scientists for the past few decades. We now know that living cells take advantage of stochasticity in some cases and counteract stochastic effects in others.…

Complex coherent dynamics is present in a wide variety of neural systems. A typical example is the voltage transitions between up and down states observed in cortical areas in the brain. In this work, we study this phenomenon via a…