Department of Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
Trends Cell Biol. 2010 Dec;20(12):723-33. doi: 10.1016/j.tcb.2010.07.002.
The study of transcription has witnessed an explosion of quantitative effort both experimentally and theoretically. In this article we highlight some of the exciting recent experimental efforts in the study of transcription with an eye to the demands that such experiments put on theoretical models of transcription. From a modeling perspective, we focus on two broad classes of models: the so-called thermodynamic models that use statistical mechanics to reckon the level of gene expression as probabilities of promoter occupancy, and rate-equation treatments that focus on the temporal evolution of the activity of a given promoter and that make it possible to compute the distributions of messenger RNA and proteins. We consider several appealing case studies to illustrate how quantitative models have been used to dissect transcriptional regulation.
转录研究在实验和理论上都取得了巨大的进展。本文重点介绍了转录研究中一些令人兴奋的最新实验成果，并着眼于这些实验对转录理论模型的要求。从建模的角度来看，我们主要关注两类模型：所谓的热力学模型，它使用统计力学来计算基因表达的水平，作为启动子占据的概率；以及速率方程处理方法，它专注于特定启动子的活性的时间演变，并使计算信使 RNA 和蛋白质的分布成为可能。我们考虑了几个有吸引力的案例研究，来说明定量模型如何用于剖析转录调控。
