Resource Sharing Controls Gene Expression Bursting.

Abstract

Episodic gene expression, with periods of high expression separated by periods of no expression, is a pervasive biological phenomenon. This bursty pattern of expression draws from a finite reservoir of expression machinery in a highly time variant way, i.e., requiring no resources most of the time but drawing heavily on them during short intense bursts, that intimately links expression bursting and resource sharing. Yet, most recent investigations have focused on specific molecular mechanisms intrinsic to the bursty behavior of individual genes, while little is known about the interplay between resource sharing and global expression bursting behavior. Here, we confine Escherichia coli cell extract in both cell-sized microfluidic chambers and lipid-based vesicles to explore how resource sharing influences expression bursting. Interestingly, expression burst size, but not burst frequency, is highly sensitive to the size of the shared transcription and translation resource pools. The intriguing implication of these results is that expression bursts are more readily amplified than initiated, suggesting that burst formation occurs through positive feedback or cooperativity. When extrapolated to prokaryotic cells, these results suggest that large translational bursts may be correlated with large transcriptional bursts. This correlation is supported by recently reported transcription and translation bursting studies in E. coli. The results reported here demonstrate a strong intimate link between global expression burst patterns and resource sharing, and they suggest that bursting plays an important role in optimizing the use of limited, shared expression resources.