How cells tame noise while maintaining ultrasensitive transcriptional responses.

ABSTRACT: Ultrasensitive transcriptional switches are essential for converting gradual molecular inputs into decisive gene expression responses, enabling critical behaviors such as bistability and oscillations. While cooperative binding, relying on direct repressor-DNA binding, has been classically regarded as a key ultrasensitivity mechanism, recent theoretical works have demonstrated that combinations of indirect repression mechanisms-sequestration, blocking, and displacement-can also achieve ultrasensitive switches with greater robustness to transcriptional noise. However, these previous works have neglected key biological constraints such as DNA binding kinetics and the limited availability of transcriptional activators, raising the question of whether ultrasensitivity and noise robustness can b

SUBMITTER: Jeong EM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12721554 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature