Regulating gene expression to achieve temporal precision

Abstract

Cellular response to a stimulus is often triggered by accumulation of an appropriate gene product up to a critical threshold. How cells regulate gene expression to achieve precision in timing of such responses is a question of interest. Earlier work has shown that for a stable gene product, a constant rate of accumulation provides minimum noise in the time of response, provided that initial gene product distribution is degenerate. Here, we show that this strategy is no longer optimal if the initial gene product level is drawn from a non-degenerate distribution. We also discuss biological relevance of this finding.