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Influence of Complex Promoter Structure on Gene Expression

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Abstract

A gene is often regulated by a variety of transcription factors, leading to complex promoter structure. However, how this structure affects gene expression remains elusive. Here, this paper studies a stochastic gene model with the promoter containing arbitrarily many active and inactive states. First, the authors use the binomial moment method to derive analytical steady-state distributions of the mRNA and protein numbers. Then, the authors analytically investigate how the promoter structure impacts the mean expression levels and the expression noise. Third, numerical simulation finds interesting phenomena, e.g., the common on-off model overestimates the expression noise in contrast to multiple-state models; the multi-on mechanism can reduce the expression noise more than the multi-off mechanism if the mean expression level is kept the same; and multiple exits of transcription can result in multimodal distributions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematics and Computers, Engineering Research Center of Hubei Province for Clothing Information, Wuhan Textile University, Wuhan, 430200, China

    Huahai Qiu, Bengong Zhang & Tianshou Zhou

Authors
  1. Huahai Qiu
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  2. Bengong Zhang
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  3. Tianshou Zhou
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Bengong Zhang or Tianshou Zhou.

Additional information

This research was supported by Science and Technology Department under Grant No. 2014CB964703, the Natural Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 91530320, 11401448, 61573011, the Hubei Province Education Department under Grant No. B2016062, and the Science and Technology Department of Hubei Province under Grant Nos. 2017CFB682 and 2018CFB688.

This paper was recommended for publication by Editor SUN Jian.

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Qiu, H., Zhang, B. & Zhou, T. Influence of Complex Promoter Structure on Gene Expression. J Syst Sci Complex 32, 600–614 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11424-018-7224-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11424-018-7224-7

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