Gene circuit designs for noisy excitable dynamics

TL;DR

This paper reviews gene circuit architectures capable of producing noise-driven excitable protein expression pulses, highlighting how different bifurcation structures influence dynamics regardless of circuit design.

Contribution

It provides an overview of gene circuit designs that exhibit excitable pulses and clarifies how bifurcation structures determine dynamics independently of circuit architecture.

Findings

Different excitable dynamics depend on bifurcation structures.

Gene circuit design alone does not determine excitable class.

Multiple classes of excitable behavior can arise from the same circuit with parameter changes.

Abstract

Certain cellular processes take the form of activity pulses that can be interpreted in terms of noise-driven excitable dynamics. Here we present an overview of different gene circuit architectures that exhibit excitable pulses of protein expression, when subject to molecular noise. Different types of excitable dynamics can occur depending on the bifurcation structure leading to the specific excitable phase-space topology. The bifurcation structure is not, however, linked to a particular circuit architecture. Thus a given gene circuit design can sustain different classes of excitable dynamics depending on the system parameters.