ﻻ يوجد ملخص باللغة العربية
Evolution of gene regulation is crucial for our understanding of the phenotypic differences between species, populations and individuals. Sequence-specific binding of transcription factors to the regulatory regions on the DNA is a key regulatory mechanism that determines gene expression and hence heritable phenotypic variation. We use a biophysical model for directional selection on gene expression to estimate the rates of gain and loss of transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) in finite populations under both point and insertion/deletion mutations. Our results show that these rates are typically slow for a single TFBS in an isolated DNA region, unless the selection is extremely strong. These rates decrease drastically with increasing TFBS length or increasingly specific protein-DNA interactions, making the evolution of sites longer than ~10 bp unlikely on typical eukaryotic speciation timescales. Similarly, evolution converges to the stationary distribution of binding sequences very slowly, making the equilibrium assumption questionable. The availability of longer regulatory sequences in which multiple binding sites can evolve simultaneously, the presence of pre-sites or partially decayed old sites in the initial sequence, and biophysical cooperativity between transcription factors, can all facilitate gain of TFBS and reconcile theoretical calculations with timescales inferred from comparative genetics.
Biological systems are typically highly open, non-equilibrium systems that are very challenging to understand from a statistical mechanics perspective. While statistical treatments of evolutionary biological systems have a long and rich history, exam
We study the effects of multiple binding sites in the promoter of a genetic oscillator. We evaluate the regulatory function of a promoter with multiple binding sites in the absence of cooperative binding, and consider different hypotheses for how the
Much of the complexity observed in gene regulation originates from cooperative protein-DNA binding. While studies of the target search of proteins for their specific binding sites on the DNA have revealed design principles for the quantitative charac
A theory for qualitative models of gene regulatory networks has been developed over several decades, generally considering transcription factors to regulate directly the expression of other transcription factors, without any intermediate variables. H
Biophysicists are modeling conformations of interphase chromosomes, often basing the strengths of interactions between segments distant on the genetic map on contact frequencies determined experimentally. Here, instead, we develop a fitting-free, min