Heterodimer Autorepression Loop: A Robust and Flexible Pulse-Generating Genetic Module

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of the heterodimer autorepression loop (HAL), a small genetic module in which a protein A acts as an auto-repressor and binds to a second protein B to form a AB dimer. For suitable values of the rate constants the HAL produces pulses of A alternating with pulses of B. By means of analytical and numerical calculations, we show that the duration of A-pulses is extremely robust against variation of the rate constants while the duration of the B-pulses can be flexibly adjusted. The HAL is thus a minimal genetic module generating robust pulses with tunable duration an interesting property for cellular signalling.

Noise Analysis in Biochemical Complex Formation

“…Since many complexes that occur in biochemical systems are made of multiple species [32], studying their noise behavior and relating it to their function would be an important direction of future research. It would also be interesting to explore reversible kinetics for the complex formation (i.e., Z dissociates to its constituents), and also self-regulation in production of the species as found in production of a range of proteins [33][34][35].…”