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Biophys J. 2017 Jun 6;112(11):2428-2438. doi: 10.1016/j.bpj.2017.05.002.

Transient Thresholding: A Mechanism Enabling Noncooperative Transcriptional Circuitry to Form a Switch.

Author information

1
Bioinformatics Graduate Group, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California.
2
Gladstone Institutes (Virology and Immunology), San Francisco, California.
3
Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, Caltech, Pasadena, California.
4
Gladstone Institutes (Virology and Immunology), San Francisco, California; Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California. Electronic address: leor.weinberger@gladstone.ucsf.edu.

Abstract

Threshold generation in fate-selection circuits is often achieved through deterministic bistability, which requires cooperativity (i.e., nonlinear activation) and associated hysteresis. However, the Tat positive-feedback loop that controls HIV's fate decision between replication and proviral latency lacks self-cooperativity and deterministic bistability. Absent cooperativity, it is unclear how HIV can temporarily remain in an off-state long enough for the kinetically slower epigenetic silencing mechanisms to act-expression fluctuations should rapidly trigger active positive feedback and replication, precluding establishment of latency. Here, using flow cytometry and single-cell imaging, we find that the Tat circuit exhibits a transient activation threshold. This threshold largely disappears after ∼40 h-accounting for the lack of deterministic bistability-and promoter activation shortens the lifetime of this transient threshold. Continuous differential equation models do not recapitulate this phenomenon. However, chemical reaction (master equation) models where the transcriptional transactivator and promoter toggle between inactive and active states can recapitulate the phenomenon because they intrinsically create a single-molecule threshold transiently requiring excess molecules in the inactive state to achieve at least one molecule (rather than a continuous fractional value) in the active state. Given the widespread nature of promoter toggling and transcription factor modifications, transient thresholds may be a general feature of inducible promoters.

PMID:
28591615
PMCID:
PMC5474885
[Available on 2018-06-06]
DOI:
10.1016/j.bpj.2017.05.002
[Indexed for MEDLINE]

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