The dynamics of genetic control in the cell: the good and bad of being late

Abstract

One contribution of 15 to a Theme Issue 'Dynamics, control and information in delay-coupled systems' . The expression of genes in the cell is controlled by a complex interaction network involving proteins, RNA and DNA. The molecular events associated with the nodes of such a network take place on a variety of time scales, and thus cannot be regarded as instantaneous. In many cases, the cell is robust with respect to the delay in gene expression control, behaving as if it were instantaneous. However, there are specific cases in which delay gives rise to temporal oscillations. This is the case, for example, of the expression of tumoursuppressor protein p53, of protein Hes1, involved in the differentiation of stem cells, of NFkB and Wnt, in which case delay arises implicitly from the structure of the associated network. By means of delay rate equations, we study the kinetics of small regulatory networks, emphasizing the role of delay in an evolutionary context. These models suggest that oscillations are a typical outcome of the dynamics of regulatory networks, and evolution has to work to avoid them when not required (and not vice versa).

Time delay control of symmetry-breaking primary and secondary oscillation death

“…-Time-delayed couplings arise naturally in many types of networks, for instance in coupled lasers [1], neural networks [2][3][4], electronic circuits [5], or genetic oscillators [6], due to finite signal transmission and processing times, and memory and latency effects. While investigating real-world systems, it is necessary to take time delay into account, since the presence of time delay is an inherent property of the vast majority of processes that occur in nature [7,8].…”

Chaos in time delay systems, an educational review

“…Transmission delays are common in physical networks, where they may impact synchronization processes of functionally similar constituting units [108]. Examples are optical systems [3] and gene expression networks [109]. In reaction-diffusion systems, such as the Gray-Scott model [110,111], delays impact the occurrence of self-organized spatio-temporal patterns.…”

Transient dynamics and their control in time-delay autonomous Boolean ring networks

“…With this platform, we study small ring networks of inhibitory genes, which exhibit nearly periodic oscillations of gene activity that evolve slowly to an asympotically stable periodic state. This is a prominent behavior in regulatory systems of organisms [44][45][46][47][48]. Specifically, we study the so-called repressilator [49] network, illustrated in Fig.…”