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Title: Efficient analysis of stochastic gene dynamics in the non-adiabatic regime using piecewise deterministic Markov processes

Journal Article · · Journal of the Royal Society Interface
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [2]
  1. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Univ. of Manchester, Manchester (United Kingdom)
  2. Duke Univ., Durham, NC (United States); Center for Genomic and Computational Biology, Durham, NC (United States)

Single-cell experiments show that gene expression is stochastic and bursty, a feature that can emerge from slow switching between promoter states with different activities. In addition to slow chromatin and/or DNA looping dynamics, one source of long-lived promoter states is the slow binding and unbinding kinetics of transcription factors to promoters, i.e. the non-adiabatic binding regime. Here, we introduce a simple analytical framework, known as a piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMP), that accurately describes the stochastic dynamics of gene expression in the non-adiabatic regime. We illustrate the utility of the PDMP on a non-trivial dynamical system by analysing the properties of a titration-based oscillator in the non-adiabatic limit. We first show how to transform the underlying chemical master equation into a PDMP where the slow transitions between promoter states are stochastic, but whose rates depend upon the faster deterministic dynamics of the transcription factors regulated by these promoters. We show that the PDMP accurately describes the observed periods of stochastic cycles in activator and repressor-based titration oscillators. We then generalize our PDMP analysis to more complicated versions of titration-based oscillators to explain how multiple binding sites lengthen the period and improve coherence. Finally, we show how noise-induced oscillation previously observed in a titration-based oscillator arises from non-adiabatic and discrete binding events at the promoter site.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-06NA25396
OSTI ID:
1419760
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-17-29798
Journal Information:
Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Vol. 15, Issue 138; ISSN 1742-5689
Publisher:
The Royal SocietyCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 18 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (10)

Non-adiabatic membrane voltage fluctuations driven by two ligand-gated ion channels journal July 2019
Scaling methods for accelerating kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of chemical reaction networks journal June 2019
Exact and efficient hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm for accelerated Bayesian inference of gene expression models from snapshots of single-cell transcripts journal July 2019
Single-cell stochastic gene expression kinetics with coupled positive-plus-negative feedback journal November 2019
A stochastic and dynamical view of pluripotency in mouse embryonic stem cells journal February 2018
Maintaining gene expression levels by positive feedback in burst size in the presence of infinitesimal delay journal January 2017
A stochastic and dynamical view of pluripotency in mouse embryonic stem cells text January 2017
Scaling methods for accelerating kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of chemical reaction networks text January 2019
Rare-Event Sampling of Epigenetic Landscapes and Phenotype Transitions text January 2017
Generalizing Gillespie's direct method to enable network-free simulations preprint January 2018

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