How Retroactivity Affects the Behavior of Incoherent Feedforward Loops.

ABSTRACT: An incoherent feedforward loop (IFFL) is a network motif known for its ability to accelerate responses and generate pulses. It remains an open question to understand the behavior of IFFLs in contexts with high levels of retroactivity, where an upstream transcription factor binds to numerous downstream binding sites. Here we study the behavior of IFFLs by simulating and comparing ODE models with different levels of retroactivity. We find that increasing retroactivity in an IFFL can increase, decrease, or keep the network's response time and pulse amplitude constant. This suggests that increasing retroactivity, traditionally considered an impediment to designing robust synthetic systems, could be exploited to improve the performance of IFFLs. In contrast, we find that increasing retroactivit

SUBMITTER: Wang J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7711281 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature