reliability of transcriptional cycles and the yeast cell-cycle oscillator转录和酵母细胞循环周期振荡器的可靠性.pdfVIP

Reliability of Transcriptional Cycles and the Yeast Cell-Cycle Oscillator Volkan Sevim1,2*, Xinwei Gong1,2, Joshua E. S. Socolar 1,2 1 Physics Department and Center for Nonlinear and Complex Systems, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States of America, 2 Center for Systems Biology, Institute for Genome Science and Policy, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States of America Abstract A recently published transcriptional oscillator associated with the yeast cell cycle provides clues and raises questions about the mechanisms underlying autonomous cyclic processes in cells. Unlike other biological and synthetic oscillatory networks in the literature, this one does not seem to rely on a constitutive signal or positive auto-regulation, but rather to operate through stable transmission of a pulse on a slow positive feedback loop that determines its period. We construct a continuous-time Boolean model of this network, which permits the modeling of noise through small fluctuations in the timing of events, and show that it can sustain stable oscillations. Analysis of simpler network models shows how a few building blocks can be arranged to provide stability against fluctuations. Our findings suggest that the transcriptional oscillator in yeast belongs to a new class of biological oscillators. Citation: Sevim V, Gong X, Socolar JES (2010) Reliability of Transcriptional Cycles and the Yeast Cell-Cycle Oscillator. PLoS Comput Biol 6(7): e1000842. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000842 Editor: Reka Albert, Pennsylvania State University, United States of America Received December 17, 2009; Accepted May 28, 2010; Published July 8, 2010 Copyright: 2010 Sevim et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricte