Reducing noise through translational control in an auto-regulatory gene network

caroline11

Abstract— Auto-regulatory transcriptional feedback, where the protein expressed from a gene inhibits its own transcription,is known to reduce stochastic fluctuations in protein numbers.Recent work has demonstrated the existence of negative feedback loops not only at the transcriptional level but also at the translational level. We investigate the noise suppression abilities of feedback loops at the translational level and compare them with transcriptional feedback. In particular, we consider two feedbacks at the translational level: translation blocking feedback, where the protein inhibits the translation of its mRNA, and degradation enhancing feedback, where the protein increases the degradation rate of its mRNA.