Wang Yaolai, Qi Jiaming, Shao Jie, Tang Xu-Qing
School of Science, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214122, China.
Biology (Basel). 2020 Oct 19;9(10):339. doi: 10.3390/biology9100339.
Gene transcription has been uncovered to occur in sporadic bursts. However, due to technical difficulties in differentiating individual transcription initiation events, it remains debated as to whether the burst size, frequency, or both are subject to modulation by transcriptional activators. Here, to bypass technical constraints, we addressed this issue by introducing two independent theoretical methods including analytical research based on the classic two-model and information entropy research based on the architecture of transcription apparatus. Both methods connect the signaling mechanism of transcriptional bursting to the characteristics of transcriptional uncertainty (i.e., the differences in transcriptional levels of the same genes that are equally activated). By comparing the theoretical predictions with abundant experimental data collected from published papers, the results exclusively support frequency modulation. To further validate this conclusion, we showed that the data that appeared to support size modulation essentially supported frequency modulation taking into account the existence of burst clusters. This work provides a unified scheme that reconciles the debate on burst signaling.
基因转录已被发现以零星爆发的形式发生。然而，由于区分单个转录起始事件存在技术困难，关于爆发大小、频率或两者是否受转录激活因子调节仍存在争议。在这里，为了绕过技术限制，我们通过引入两种独立的理论方法来解决这个问题，包括基于经典双模型的分析研究和基于转录装置结构的信息熵研究。这两种方法都将转录爆发的信号传导机制与转录不确定性的特征联系起来（即相同基因在同等激活条件下转录水平的差异）。通过将理论预测与从已发表论文中收集的大量实验数据进行比较，结果唯一支持频率调节。为了进一步验证这一结论，我们表明，考虑到爆发簇的存在，那些看似支持大小调节的数据实际上支持频率调节。这项工作提供了一个统一的方案，调和了关于爆发信号的争论。
