Modeling stochastic gene expression under repression

Abstract

Intrinsic transcriptional noise induced by operator fluctuations is investigated with a simple spin like stochastic model. The effects of transcriptional fluctuations in protein synthesis is probed by coupling transcription and translation by an amplificative interaction. In the presence of repression a new term contributes to the noise which depends on the rate of mRNA production. If the switching time is small compared with the mRNA life time the noise is also small. In general the dumping of protein production by a repressive agent occurs linearly but the fluctuations can show a maxima at intermediate repression. The discrepancy between the switching time, the mRNA degradation and protein degradation is crucial for the repressive control in translation without large fluctuations. The noise profiles obtained here are in quantitative agreement with recent experiments.