On the role of extrinsic noise in microRNA-mediated bimodal gene expression
by
Carla Bosia(Human Genetics Foundation, Turin)
→
Europe/Stockholm
112:028
112:028
Description
Several studies highlighted the relevance of extrinsic noise in shaping cell decision making and differentiation in molecular networks. Experimentally, evidences of phenotypic differentiation are given by the presence of bimodal distributions of gene expression levels, where the modes of the distribution often correspond to different physiological states of the system.
In this work we theoretically address the question of how extrinsic noise shapes bimodal gene distributions in the context of microRNA (miRNA)-mediated regulation. MiRNAs are small noncoding RNA molecules that downregulate the expression of their target mRNAs, whose titrative nature of the interaction
is sufficient to induce bimodal distributions of the targets. Here we study the effect of a fluctuating miRNA-transcription case, which represents the source of extrinsic noise in the system, by a combination of analytics and stochastic simulations.
