Shadow enhancers mediate trade-offs between transcriptional noise and fidelity
Fig 5
Saturating and synergistic enhancer interactions lead to different trends in noise and fidelity.
A saturated system yields mRNA at the same rate for any positive number of enhancers bound. On the other hand, a synergistic system becomes active only when all enhancers are bound to the promoter. The resulting plots of fidelity and noise corresponding to these systems show inverse relationships between noise and fidelity. In the saturating regime, low noise and high fidelity are achieved with higher enhancer numbers, while in the synergistic regime, low noise and high fidelity occur with lower enhancer numbers.