Pulsatile inputs achieve tunable attenuation of gene expression variability and graded multi-gene regulation

Dirk Benzinger and Mustafa Khammash ()
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Dirk Benzinger: ETH–Zürich
Mustafa Khammash: ETH–Zürich

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Many natural transcription factors are regulated in a pulsatile fashion, but it remains unknown whether synthetic gene expression systems can benefit from such dynamic regulation. Here we find, using a fast-acting, optogenetic transcription factor in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, that dynamic pulsatile signals reduce cell-to-cell variability in gene expression. We then show that by encoding such signals into a single input, expression mean and variability can be independently tuned. Further, we construct a light-responsive promoter library and demonstrate how pulsatile signaling also enables graded multi-gene regulation at fixed expression ratios, despite differences in promoter dose-response characteristics. Pulsatile regulation can thus lead to beneficial functional behaviors in synthetic biological systems, which previously required laborious optimization of genetic parts or the construction of synthetic gene networks.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-05882-2

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