First Passage Time Problems in Stochastic Gene Regulation

Surendran, Anudeep (2016) First Passage Time Problems in Stochastic Gene Regulation. Masters thesis, Indian Institute of science education and research Kolkata.

PDF (MS dissertation of Anudeep Surendran (11MS056)) Anudeep_11MS056_MS_Thesis.pdf - Submitted Version Restricted to Repository staff only Download (1MB)

Abstract

Gene expression is an intrinsically noisy process which results in a cell to cell variability in the copy number of gene products. This inherent stochasticity actually help cell in maintaining the phenotypic hetero- geneity. Various models have been put forward to account for this cellular stochasticity arising from gene expression. An important de- scription of such stochastic processes can be done in terms of the First Passage Time (FPT), i.e., the time taken by mRNAs/proteins to reach a particular threshold. We study the role of burstiness on First Passage Time behaviour for different models of transcriptional and translational bursts. Our analytical results and numerical simulations confirm that Mean First Passage Time monotonically decreases with burstiness. For models which doesn't show bursty transcriptional dynamics due to the presence of constitutive promoter(Birth Death model), we study the dependence of transcription rate on the MFPT. It is evident from this analysis that MFPT monotonically decreases with transcription rate as well.

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