Probing Noise in Gene Expression and Protein Production

TL;DR

This paper derives exact solutions for simplified models of gene expression dynamics, demonstrating how monitoring these dynamics can reveal the nature of noise in protein production and introduce a new measure for probing transcription phases.

Contribution

It provides exact solutions for gene expression models and introduces the cell turnover distribution as a novel tool for understanding transcription phases.

Findings

Exact solutions for protein concentration dynamics

Monitoring dynamics reveals noise characteristics

Cell turnover distribution probes transcription phase

Abstract

We derive exact solutions of simplified models for the temporal evolution of the protein concentration within a cell population arbitrarily far from the stationary state. We show that monitoring the dynamics can assist in modeling and understanding the nature of the noise and its role in gene expression and protein production. We introduce a new measure, the cell turnover distribution, which can be used to probe the phase of transcription of DNA into messenger RNA.