Cell-to-cell proteome variability: life in a cycle

Suen, Tsz Kin; Al, Burcu; Placek, Katarzyna

doi:10.1038/s41392-021-00655-8

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Experimental techniques such as single-cell RNA sequenc-ing (scRNA-seq) and single-molecule fluorescence in situ hybridization (smFISH) to quantify mRNA, and fluorescent proteomic imaging, mass cytometry and mass spectrometry to quantify protein levels in individual cells [51][52][53][54][55] have been used to demonstrate the stochastic nature of mRNA and protein production. A major source of noise in mRNA levels is transcriptional bursting, arising due to the promoter switching between transcriptionally active and inactive states 56,57 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exact distributions of threshold crossing times of proteins under post-transcriptional regulation by small RNAs

Ali,

Prasad,

Das

2024

Preprint

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The timings of several cellular events like cell lysis, cell division, or pore formation in endosomes are regulated by the time taken for the relevant proteins to cross a threshold in number or concentration. Since protein synthesis is stochastic, the threshold crossing time is a first passage problem. The exact distributions of these first passage processes have been obtained recently for unregulated and auto-regulated genes. Many proteins are however regulated by post-transcriptional regulation, controlled by small non-coding RNAs (sRNAs). Certain mathematical models of gene expressionwithpost-transcriptional sRNA regulation have been recently exactly mapped to modelswithoutsRNA regulation. Utilizing this mapping and the exact distributions, we calculate exact results on fluctuations (full distribution, all cumulants, and characteristic times) of protein threshold crossing times in the presence of sRNA regulation. We derive two interesting predictions from these exact results. We show that the size of the fluctuation of the threshold crossing times have a non-monotonic U-shaped behavior as a function of the rates of binding and unbinding of the sRNA-mRNA complex. Thus there are optimal parameters that minimize noise. Furthermore, the fluctuations in models with sRNA regulation may be higher or lower compared to the model without regulation, depending on the mean protein burst size.

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