A Constructive Approach to Gene Expression Dynamics

Abstract

The advent of new experimental genomic technologies and the massive increase of DNA sequence information is helping researchers better understand how our genes work. Recently, experiments on mRNA abundance (gene expression) have revealed that gene expression shows a stationary organization described by a power-law distribution (scale-free organization) (i.e., gene expression $k$ decays as $k^{-γ}$), which is highly conserved in all the major five kingdoms of life, from Bacteria to Human. An underlying gene expression dynamics "rich-travel-more" was suggested to recover that evolutional conservation of transcriptional organization. Here we propose a constructive approach to gene expression dynamics with larger scope. Our gene expression construction restores the stationary state, predicts the power-law exponent for different organisms with natural explanation for small correction at high and low expression levels, describes the intermediate state dynamics (time finite) and elucidates the gene expression stability. This approach requires only one assumption: Markov property.