Analytical Expressions and Physics for Single-Cell mRNA Distributions of the lac Operon of E. coli.

ABSTRACT: Mechanistic models of stochastic gene expression are of considerable interest, but their complexity often precludes tractable analytical expressions for messenger RNA (mRNA) and protein distributions. The lac operon of Escherichia coli is a model system with regulatory elements such as multiple operators and DNA looping that are shared by many operons. Although this system is complex, intuition suggests that fast DNA looping may simplify it by causing the repressor-bound states of the operon to equilibrate rapidly, thus ensuring that the subsequent dynamics are governed by slow transitions between the repressor-free and the equilibrated repressor-bound states. Here, we show that this intuition is correct by applying singular perturbation theory to a mechanistic model of lac transcription w

SUBMITTER: Choudhary K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6697386 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature