sb6b00157_si_004.zip (14.62 kB)
Entrainment of a Bacterial Synthetic Gene Oscillator through Proteolytic Queueing
dataset
posted on 2016-12-09, 00:00 authored by Nicholas
C. Butzin, Philip Hochendoner, Curtis T. Ogle, William H. MatherInternal
chemical oscillators (chemical clocks) direct the behavior
of numerous biological systems, and maintenance of a given period
and phase among many such oscillators may be important for their proper
function. However, both environmental variability and fundamental
molecular noise can cause biochemical oscillators to lose coherence.
One solution to maintaining coherence is entrainment, where an external
signal provides a cue that resets the phase of the oscillators. In
this work, we study the entrainment of gene networks by a queueing
interaction established by competition between proteins for a common
proteolytic pathway. Principles of queueing entrainment are investigated
for an established synthetic oscillator in Escherichia
coli. We first explore this theoretically using a
standard chemical reaction network model and a map-based model, both
of which suggest that queueing entrainment can be achieved through
pulsatile production of an additional protein competing for a common
degradation pathway with the oscillator proteins. We then use a combination
of microfluidics and fluorescence microscopy to verify that pulse
trains modulating the production rate of a fluorescent protein targeted
to the same protease (ClpXP) as the synthetic oscillator can entrain
the oscillator.