title: Mechanical bounds to transcriptional noise.
abstract: Over the past several decades it has been increasingly recognized that stochastic processes play a central role in transcription. Although many stochastic effects have been explained, the source of transcriptional bursting (one of the most well-known sources of stochasticity) has continued to evade understanding. Recent results have pointed to mechanical feedback as the source of transcriptional bursting, but a reconciliation of this perspective with preexisting views of transcriptional regulation is lacking. In this article, we present a simple phenomenological model that is able to incorporate the traditional view of gene expression within a framework with mechanical limits to transcription. By introducing a simple competition between mechanical arrest and relaxation copy number probability distributions collapse onto a shared universal curve under shifting and rescaling and a lower limit of intrinsic noise for any mean expression level is found.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005; herbert.levine@rice.edu s.a.sevier@rice.edu.|Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005.
authors.forename: Stuart A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Sevier
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan IL52900, Israel.
authors.forename: David A
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-5279-1655
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Kessler
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005; herbert.levine@rice.edu s.a.sevier@rice.edu.|Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005.|Department of Bioengineering, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005.
authors.forename: Herbert
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Levine
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D004264:DNA Topoisomerases, Type I / Q000502:physiology; D004278:DNA, Superhelical / Q000378:metabolism / Q000502:physiology; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008465:Mechanoreceptors / Q000378:metabolism / Q000502:physiology; D008954:Models, Biological; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011336:Probability; D012333:RNA, Messenger / Q000378:metabolism; D013269:Stochastic Processes; D014158:Transcription, Genetic / Q000502:physiology; D015533:Transcriptional Activation / Q000235:genetics / Q000502:physiology*
chemical_list: D004278:DNA, Superhelical; D012333:RNA, Messenger; D004264:DNA Topoisomerases, Type I
keywords: bursting noise; supercoiling; topoisomerase; transcription