Determining Physical Mechanisms of Gene Expression Regulation from Single Cell Gene Expression Data
Fig 1
Two-state model of bursty gene expression.
The distribution of gene expression in a population of cells is partially caused by bursts of gene expression. (A) In the two state model of bursting gene expression, a gene stochastically turns on at rate Kon and off at rate Koff. When the gene is on, it transcribes mRNA at a rate of Kt. Note that all three rates are normalised to the rate of mRNA degradation (Kd). (B) These kinetic parameters control the shape of the gene expression distribution. In this figure, we keep Kt = 100 and vary Kon and Koff. At high Kon the distribution of mRNA transcripts is similar to a Poisson distribution (i), at high Koff the distribution of mRNA transcripts is similar to a negative binomial (ii), and at low values for Kon and Koff the distribution is bimodal (iii).