Transcription and noise in negative feedback loops

Recently, several studies have investigated the transcription process associated to specific genetic regulatory networks. In this work, we present a stochastic approach for analyzing the dynamics and effect of negative feedback loops (FBL) on the transcriptional noise. First, our analysis allows us to identify a bimodal activity depending on the strength of self-repression coupling D. In the strong coupling region D≫1, our findings indicate that the variance of the transcriptional noise is reduced 28% more than described earlier. Secondly, the contribution of the noise effect to the abundance of regulating protein becomes manifest when the coefficient of variation is computed. In the strong coupling region, this coefficient was found to be independent of all parameters and in fair agreement with the experimentally observed values. Finally, our analysis reveals that the regulating protein is significantly induced by the intrinsic and external noise in the strong coupling region. In short, it indicates that the existence of inherent noise in FBL makes it possible to produce a basal amount of proteins even though the repression level D is very strong.