Sources of stochasticity in constitutive and autoregulated gene expression

TL;DR

This paper investigates the sources of randomness in gene expression, comparing models of constitutive and autoregulated genes, and introduces new findings for autoregulated systems with cell growth.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of stochastic gene expression and presents novel results for autoregulated genes with cell growth modeled linearly.

Findings

Different sources of stochasticity affect gene expression variability.

Autoregulatory feedback influences noise levels in gene expression.

New analytical results for autoregulated genes with cell growth.

Abstract

Gene expression is inherently noisy as many steps in the read-out of the genetic information are stochastic. To disentangle the effect of different sources of stochasticity in such systems, we consider various models that describe some processes as stochastic and others as deterministic. We review earlier results for unregulated (constitutive) gene expression and present new results for a gene controlled by negative autoregulation with cell growth modeled by linear volume growth.